Continuous measurement and the classical limit of the motion of an atom in a magneto-optical double-well potential

Summary form only given. The recovery of the classical limit in quantum systems that have underlying chaotic dynamics is a key question in current studies of the quantum to classical transition. Interaction with an environment results in decoherence that can cause the quantum Wigner function to approach the corresponding classical phase space distribution by suppressing quantum interference effects, but it fails to extract localized classical trajectories from the quantum dynamics. Such trajectories are crucial for quantifying chaos both theoretically and in experiments through the measure of the Lyapunov exponents. One can recover trajectories from the quantum dynamics through the process of continuous measurements when the record is retained. Ehrenfest s theorem guarantees that quantum systems that are well localized by the measurement effectively obey classical mechanics. We have studied the role of continuous measurement in recovering the classical chaotic dynamics of laser cooled atoms in a magneto-optical lattice of double wells.