Arnol’d diffusion in a system with 2.5 degrees of freedom: Classical and quantum mechanical approaches

Arnol’d diffusion, a universal phenomenon in nonlinear dynamics, is analyzed for a model system with 2.5 degrees of freedom. Only the three primary order resonances are taken into account, and the results obtained by using classical and quantum mechanical approaches are compared. It is shown that the parameter dependence of the rate of quantum Arnol’d diffusion is similar to the classical one, but the quantum diffusion coefficient is smaller by approximately an order of magnitude. It is found that the existence of a threshold with respect to perturbation parameters, pointed out earlier, is not an indispensable feature of quantum Arnol’d diffusion. It is shown that a quantum system with weakly overlapping resonances can exhibit mixed dynamics that has no classical counterpart (diffusion along a resonance superimposed by oscillations across the overlapped resonances).