Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE
Quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects for the damped harmonic oscillator
Sabrina Maniscalco, Jyrki Piilo, Kalle‐Antti Suominen
Abstract
The quantum Zeno effect predicts that the decay of an unstable system can be slowed down by measuring the system frequently enough. In some systems, however, an enhancement of the decay due to frequent measurements, namely the anti-Zeno effect, may occur. In this paper we study the Zeno-anti-Zeno crossover for quantum Brownian motion. Moreover, we propose a way to manipulate the decay of the system and to observe a controlled continuous passage from decay suppression to decay acceleration by using reservoir engineering techniques.