Experimental Observation of a Time-Driven Phase Transition in Quantum Chaos

Dynamical Stability in a Non-Hermitian Kicked Rotor Model

We investigate the quantum irreversibility and quantum diffusion in a non-Hermitian kicked rotor model for which the kicking strength is complex. Our results show that the exponential decay of Loschmidt echo gradually disappears with increasing the strength of the imaginary part of non-Hermitian driven potential, demonstrating the suppress of the exponential instability by non-Hermiticity. The quantum diffusion exhibits the dynamical localization in momentum space, namely, the mean square of momentum increases to saturation with time evolution, which decreases with the increase of the strength of the imaginary part of the kicking. This clearly reveals the enhancement of dynamical localization by non-Hermiticity. We find, both analytically and numerically, that the quantum state are mainly populated on a very few quasieigenstates with significantly large value of the imaginary part of quasienergies. Interestingly, the average value of the inverse participation ratio of quasieigenstates decreases with the increase of the strength of the imaginary part of the kicking potential, which implies that the feature of quasieigenstates determines the stability of wavepacket’s dynamics and the dynamical localization of energy diffusion.

Exploring the effects of phase modulation on the dynamics of the kicked rotor systems

Inspired by the recent experimental progress in the time-driven phase transition in quantum chaos, we investigate comprehensively the energy diffusion of a kicked rotor in the presence of phase modulation. In the classical case, we found that there always exists anomalous diffusion as long as the phase is modulated periodically and changes by 0 or π from kick to kick. On the contrary, for quasiperiodic and random phase modulation, anomalous diffusion is suppressed. On the other hand, in the quantum case, there exist only ballistic energy diffusion and dynamical localization in the standard and periodically shifted cases, while random phase modulation destroys the quantum coherence and totally suppresses the dynamical localization. Furthermore, the quasiperiodic phase modulation is an intermediate phase between the standard case and the random one. In both the classical and quantum cases, quasiperiodic phase modulation is inequivalent to random phase modulation at large kicking times (>10^{3}), thus caution has to be taken when dealing with these two kinds of phase modulation in experiments.

Protected quantum coherence by gain and loss in a noisy quantum kicked rotor

We study the effects of non-Hermiticity on quantum coherence via a noisy quantum kicked rotor (NQKR). The random noise comes from the fluctuations in kick amplitude at each time. The non-Hermitian driving indicates the imaginary kicking potential, representing the environment-induced atom gain and loss. In the absence of gain and loss, the random noise destroys quantum coherence manifesting dynamical localization, which leads to classical diffusion. Interestingly, in the presence of non-Hermitian kicking potential, the occurrence of dynamical localization is highly sensitive to the gain and loss, manifesting the restoration of quantum coherence. Using the inverse participation ratio arguments, we numerically obtain a phase diagram of the classical diffusion and dynamical localization on the parameter plane of noise amplitude and non-Hermitian driving strength. With the help of analysis on the corresponding quasieigenstates, we achieve insight into dynamical localization, and uncover that the origin of the localization is interference between multiple quasi-eigenstates of the quantum kicked rotor. We further propose an experimental scheme to realize the NQKR in a dissipative cold atomic gas, which paves the way for future experimental investigation of an NQKR and its anomalous non-Hermitian properties.