Exponentially Rapid Decoherence of Quantum Chaotic Systems

We use a recent result to show that the rate of loss of coherence of a quantum system increases with increasing system phase-space structure and that a chaotic quantal system in the semiclassical limit decoheres exponentially with rate 2l2, where l2 is a generalized Lyapunov exponent. As a result, for example, the dephasing time for classically chaotic systems goes to infinity logarithmically with the temperature, in accord with recent experimental results. [S0031-9007(97)04643-7]