Faster than Lyapunov decays of the classical Loschmidt echo.

We show that in the classical interaction picture the echo dynamics, namely, the composition of perturbed forward and unperturbed backward Hamiltonian evolution, can be treated as a time-dependent Hamiltonian system. For strongly chaotic (Anosov) systems we derive a cascade of exponential decays for the classical Loschmidt echo, starting with the leading Lyapunov exponent, followed by a sum of the two largest exponents, etc. In the loxodromic case a decay starts with the rate given as twice the largest Lyapunov exponent. For a class of perturbations of symplectic maps the echo dynamics exhibits a drift resulting in a superexponential decay of the Loschmidt echo.