The Role of the Environment in Chaotic Quantum Dynamics

We study how the interaction with an external incoherent environment induces a crossover from quantum to classical behavior for a particle whose classical motion is chaotic. Posing the problem in the semiclassical regime, we find that noise produced by the bath coupling rather than dissipation is primarily responsible for the dephasing that results in the ``classicalization'' of the particle. We find that the bath directly alters the phase space structures that signal the onset of classical chaos. This dephasing is shown to have a semiclassical interpretation: the noise renders the interfering paths indistinguishable and therefore incoherent. The noise is also shown to contribute to the quantum inhibition of mixing by creating new paths that interfere coherently.