title: Fluctuations and decoherence in chaos-assisted tunneling.
abstract: We study quantum dynamical tunneling between two symmetry-related islands of stability in the phase space of a classically chaotic system. The setting for these experiments is the motion of carefully prepared samples of cesium atoms in an amplitude-modulated standing wave of light. We examine the dependence of the tunneling dynamics on the system parameters and indicate how the observed features provide evidence for chaos-assisted (three-state) tunneling. We also observe the influence of a noisy perturbation of the standing-wave intensity, which destroys the tunneling oscillations, and we show that the tunneling is more sensitive to the noise for a smaller value of the effective Planck constant.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Center for Nonlinear Dynamics, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712-1081, USA.
authors.forename: Daniel A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Steck
authors.forename: Windell H
authors.initials: WH
authors.lastname: Oskay
authors.forename: Mark G
authors.initials: MG
authors.lastname: Raizen