Chaos in the quantum Duffing oscillator in the semiclassical regime under parametrized dissipation.

Abstract

We study the quantum dissipative Duffing oscillator across a range of system sizes and environmental couplings under varying semiclassical approximations. Using spatial complexity metrics based on Kullback-Leibler distances between phase-space attractors and temporal complexity metrics based on the Lyapunov exponent, we isolate the effect of the environment on quantum-classical differences. Moreover, we quantify the system sizes where quantum dynamics cannot be simulated using semiclassical or noise-added classical approximations. We find that a remarkable parametrically invariant meta-attractor emerges at a specific length scale and noise-added classical models deviate strongly from quantum dynamics below this scale. We also generalize the previous surprising result that classically regular orbits can have the greatest quantum-classical differences in the semiclassical regime and show that the dynamical growth of quantum-classical differences is not determined by the degree of classical chaos.