Fidelity Decay Saturation Level for Initial Eigenstates

Abstract

We show that the fidelity decay between an initial eigenstate evolved under a unitary chaotic operator and the same eigenstate evolved under a perturbed operator saturates well before the 1/N limit expected for a generic initial state, where N is the dimension of the Hilbert space. We provide a theoretical argument and numerical evidence that, for perturbations of intermediate strength, the saturation level depends quadratically on the perturbation strength. PACS: 05.45.Mt; 03.67.Lx