General theoretic approach to classical Loschmidt echoes in chaotic systems with many degrees of freedom is developed. For perturbations which affect essentially all degrees of freedom we find a doubly exponential decay with the rate determined by the largest Lyapunov exponent. The scaling of the decay rate on the perturbation strength depends on whether the initial phase-space density is continuous or not.
Categories: nlin.CD cond-mat.stat-mech