Manifestation of chaotic behavior is found in an intrinsically quantum property. The entanglement process, quantitatively expressed in terms of the reduced density linear entropy, is studied for the $N$-atom Jaynes-Cummings model. For a given energy, initial conditions are prepared as minimum uncertainty wave packets centered at regular and chaotic regions of the classical phase space. We find for short times a faster increase in decoherence for the chaotic initial conditions as compared to regular ones, which have oscillatory increase.

• Received 9 October 1997

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.80.5524