Semiclassical evaluation of quantum fidelity

Abstract

We present a numerically feasible semiclassical (SC) method to evaluate quantum fidelity decay (Loschmidt echo, FD) in a classically chaotic system. It was thought that such evaluation would be intractable, but instead we show that a uniform SC expression not only is tractable but it gives remarkably accurate numerical results for the standard map in both the Fermi-golden-rule and Lyapunov regimes. Because it allows Monte Carlo evaluation, the uniform expression is accurate at times when there are 10^70 semiclassical contributions. Remarkably, it also explicitly contains the ``building blocks'' of analytical theories of recent literature, and thus permits a direct test of the approximations made by other authors in these regimes, rather than an a posteriori comparison with numerical results. We explain in more detail the extended validity of the classical perturbation approximation (CPA) and show that within this approximation, the so-called ``diagonal approximation'' is automatic and does not require ensemble averaging.