We employ the Loschmidt echo, i.e., the signal recovered after the reversal of an evolution, to identify and quantify the processes contributing to decoherence. This procedure, which has been extensively used in single-particle physics, is employed here in a spin ladder. The isolated chains have
1/2 spins with
XY interaction and their excitations would sustain a one-body-like propagation. One of them constitutes the controlled system
S whose reversible dynamics is degraded by the weak coupling with the uncontrolled second chain, i.e., the environment
E. The perturbative
SE coupling is swept through arbitrary combinations of
XY and Ising-like interactions, that contain the standard Heisenberg and dipolar ones. Different time regimes are identified for the Loschmidt echo dynamics in this perturbative configuration. In particular, the exponential decay scales as a Fermi golden rule, where the contributions of the different
SE terms are individually evaluated and analyzed. Comparisons with previous analytical and numerical evaluations of decoherence based on the attenuation of specific interferences show that the Loschmidt echo is an advantageous decoherence quantifier at any time, regardless of the
S internal dynamics.
Typical dynamical quantum chaos probes are initial-state dependent (e.g., local observables or purities) and thus may fail to capture typical decoherent behavior one expects of a subsystem. Quantum channels fully capture the reduced dynamics of a subsystem. Here, we investigate the purity of the Choi state of a single spin in a chain, which acts as the state representation of the channel encoding the reduced dynamics. Operationally, we show this quantity functions as an echo protocol, termed the \textit{Choi echo}. It measures the environment's recovery fidelity when subjected to a forward evolution, a completely depolarizing operation on the local subsystem, and a subsequent backward evolution. We investigate the equilibration value of the Choi echo across the integrability-to-chaos transition in three paradigmatic spin-
1/2 chains. We show that average single-spin decoherence does not uniquely correspond to spectral chaos. Specifically, coherent transport in integrable systems can mimic the mean relaxation of a single spin typically induced by chaotic scrambling, generating false positives for spectral chaos. This work offers a perspective bridging quantum information tools with many-body quantum chaos.
We consider a linear quench from the paramagnetic to ferromagnetic phase in the quantum Ising chain interacting with a static spin environment. Both decoherence from the environment and nonadiabaticity of the evolution near a critical point excite the system from the final ferromagnetic ground state. For weak decoherence and relatively fast quenches the excitation energy, proportional to the number of kinks in the final state, decays like an inverse square root of a quench time, but slow transitions or strong decoherence makes it decay in a much slower logarithmic way. We also find that fidelity between the final ferromagnetic ground state and a final state after a quench decays exponentially with a size of a chain, with a decay rate proportional to average density of excited kinks and a proportionality factor evolving from 1.3 for weak decoherence and fast quenches to approximately 1 for slow transitions or strong decoherence. Simultaneously, correlations between kinks randomly distributed along the chain evolve from a near-crystalline antibunching to a Poissonian distribution of kinks in a number of isolated Anderson localization centers randomly scattered along the chain.
We study decoherence induced on a two-level system coupled to a one-dimensional quantum spin chain. We consider the cases where the dynamics of the chain is determined by the Ising,
XY, or Heisenberg exchange Hamiltonian. This model of quantum baths can be of fundamental importance for the understanding of decoherence in open quantum systems, since it can be experimentally engineered by using atoms in optical lattices. As an example, here we show how to implement a pure dephasing model for a qubit system coupled to an interacting spin bath. We provide results that go beyond the case of a central spin coupled uniformly to all the spins of the bath, in particular showing what happens when the bath enters different phases, or becomes critical; we also study the dependence of the coherence loss on the number of bath spins to which the system is coupled and we describe a coupling-independent regime in which decoherence exhibits universal features, irrespective of the system-environment coupling strength. Finally, we establish a relation between decoherence and entanglement inside the bath. For the Ising and the
XY models we are able to give an exact expression for the decay of coherences, while for the Heisenberg bath we resort to the numerical time-dependent density matrix renormalization group.
We study the evolution of a system of two qubits, each of which interacts locally with a spin chain with nontrivial internal Hamiltonian. We present an exact solution to this problem and analyze the dependence of decoherence on the distance between the interaction sites. In the strong coupling regime we find that decoherence increases with increasing distance. In the weak coupling regime the dependence of decoherence with distance is not generic (i.e., it varies according to the initial state). Decoherence becomes independent of distance when the latter is over a saturation length
l. Numerical results for the Ising chain suggest that the saturation scale is related to the correlation length $\ensuremath{\xi}$. For strong coupling we display evidence of the existence of non-Markovian effects (such as environment-induced interactions between the qubits). As a consequence the system can undergo a quasiperiodic sequence of ``sudden deaths and revivals'' of entanglement, with a time scale related to the distance between qubits.
We discuss the quantum dynamics of an isolated composite system consisting of weakly interacting many-body subsystems. We focus on one of the subsystems, S, and study the dependence of its quantum correlations and decoherence rate on the state of the weakly-coupled complementary part E, which represents the environment. As a theoretical laboratory, we consider a composite system made of two stacked quantum Ising chains, locally and homogeneously weakly coupled. One of the chains is identified with the subsystem S under scrutiny, and the other one with the environment E. We investigate the behavior of S at equilibrium, when the global system is in its ground state, and under out-of-equilibrium conditions, when the global system evolves unitarily after a quench of the coupling between S and E. When S develops quantum critical correlations in the weak-coupling regime, the associated scaling behavior crucially depends on the quantum state of E, whether it is characterized by short-range correlations (analogous to those characterizing disordered phases in closed systems), algebraically decaying correlations (typical of critical systems), or long-range correlations (typical of magnetized ordered phases). In particular, different scaling behaviors, depending on the state of E, are observed for the decoherence of the subsystem S, as demonstrated by the different power-law divergences of the decoherence susceptibility that quantifies the sensitivity of the coherence to the interaction with E.