Wu Saijun, Tonyushkin Alexey, Prentiss Mara G
Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Phys Rev Lett. 2009 Jul 17;103(3):034101. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.034101. Epub 2009 Jul 16.
We use an atom interferometer to investigate the dynamics of matter waves in a periodically pulsed optical standing wave: an atom optics realization of the quantum kicked rotor that exhibits chaotic classical dynamics. We experimentally show that a measure of the coherence between the interferometer diffraction orders can revive after a quick initial loss, and can approach a finite asymptote as the number of kicks increases. This observation demonstrates that quantum fidelity of a classically chaotic system can survive strong perturbations over long times without decay.
