Classical Loschmidt echo in chaotic many-body systems

Abstract

General theoretic approach to classical Loschmidt echoes in chaotic systems with many degrees of freedom is developed. For perturbations which affect essentially all degrees of freedom we find a doubly exponential decay with the rate determined by the largest Lyapunov exponent. The scaling of the decay rate on the perturbation strength depends on whether the initial phase-space density is continuous or not.