Markus Glück, Andrey R. Kolovsky, Hans Jürgen Korsch

• The quasienergy spectrum of a Bloch electron affected by dc-ac fields is known to have a fractal structure as function of the so-called electric matching ratio, which is the ratio of the ac field frequency and the Bloch frequency. This paper studies a manifestation of the fractal nature of the spectrum in the system "atom in a standing laser wave", which is a quantum optical realization of a Bloch electron. It is shown that for an appropriate choice of the system parameters the atomic survival probability (a quantity measured in laboratory experiments) also develops a fractal structure as a function of the electric matching ratio. Numerical simulations under classically chaotic scattering conditions show good agreement with theoretical predictions based on random matrix theory.