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Journal of Optics B Quantum and Semiclassical Optics

A study on the fast decoherence process

Cui H T, Wei Guo Wu, Yi X X

Published Oct 16, 2003• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We consider a decoherence process in an open system, whose temporal evolution is dominated by the interaction with its environment. Treating the free Hamiltonian as a perturbative term, we obtain a perturbative expansion for the reduced density operator of the system. The preferred pointer states coincide with the eigenstates of the coupling agent and the free evolution leads to population transfer between those pointer states. Examples of applications are presented and discussed.

DOI
10.1088/1464-4266/5/6/008

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We consider a decoherence process in an open system, whose temporal evolution is dominated by the interaction with its environment. Treating the free Hamiltonian as a perturbative term, we obtain a perturbative expansion for the reduced density operator of the system. The preferred pointer states coincide with the eigenstates of the coupling agent and the free evolution leads to population transfer between those pointer states. Examples of applications are presented and discussed.
We consider the quantized atom-field model and for the regime ; where , and respectively represent the self-Hamiltonians of the environment, the system, and the interaction between the system and the environment. Considering a single-mode quantized field we obtain the time evolution operator for the model. Using our time evolution operator we calculate the time-dependent pointer states of the system and the environment, which are characterized by their property of not entangling with states of another subsystem. We obtain a closed form expression for the off-diagonal element of the reduced density matrix of the system and study the decoherence of the central system in our model. We show that for the case where the system initially is not prepared in one of its pointer states, the off-diagonal element of the reduced density matrix of the system decays with a decoherence time that is inversely proportional to the square root of the mass of the bosonic field particles.
Due to recent advances in quantum information, as well as in mesoscopic and nanoscale physics, the interest in the theory of open systems and decoherence has significantly increased. In this paper, we present an interesting approach to solving a time-convolutionless equation of motion for the open system reduced density matrix beyond the limit of weak coupling with the environment. Our approach is based on identifying an effective, memory-containing interaction in the equations of motion for the representation submatrices of the evolution operator (these submatices are written in a special basis, adapted for the ``partial-trace-free'' approach, in the system+environment\mathrm{system}+\mathrm{environment}system+environment Liouville space). We then identify the ``memory dressing,'' a quantity crucial for solving the equation of motion for the reduced density matrix, which separates the effective from the real physical interaction. The memory dressing obeys a self-contained nonlinear equation of motion, which we solve exactly. The solution can be represented in a diagrammatic fashion after introducing an ``information exchange propagator,'' a quantity that describes the transfer of information to and from the system, so the cumulative effect of the information exchange results in the memory dressing. In the case of weak system-environment coupling, we present the expansion of the reduced density matrix in terms of the physical interaction up to the third order. However, our approach is capable of going beyond the weak-coupling limit, and we show how short-time behavior of an open system can be analyzed for arbitrary coupling strength. We illustrate the approach with a simple numerical example of single-particle level broadening for a two-particle interacting system on short time scales. Furthermore, we point out a way to identify the structure of decoherence-free subspaces using the present approach.
We consider a model of environment-induced dissipationless decoherence of a quantum system where the system is coupled to the bath degrees of freedom via the system Hamiltonian itself. We solve exactly for the reduced density operator of the system for an arbitrary spectral density of the thermal bath and also write down an exact master equation in the Lindblad form. We compare and contrast the above results with those obtained by considering the system frequencies to be randomly modulated as in stochastic models. We observe that a coupling to the bath as above necessarily induces a Kerr-like coherent contribution in the reduced dynamics of the system. This Kerr-like term is a reflection of the quantum nature of the bath and cannot be obtained from stochastic models. For the special case of a harmonic oscillator we consider the influence of decoherence and its relation with phase diffusion. Our numerical results exhibit oscillations in the evolution of system variables which overall is a signature of the quantum nature of the environment.
The notion that decoherence rapidly reduces a superposition state to an incoherent mixture implicitly adopts a special representation, namely, the representation of preferred (pointer) states (PS). For weak or strong system-envrionment interaction, the behavior of PS is well known. Via a simple dynamical model that simulates a two-level system interacting with few other degrees of freedom as its environment, it is shown that even for intermediate system-environment coupling, approximate PS may still emerge from the coherent quantum dynamics of the whole system in the absence of any thermal averaging. The found PS can also continuously deform to expected limits for weak or strong system-environment coupling. Computational results are also qualitatively explained. The findings should be useful towards further understanding of decoherence and quantum thermalization processes.
The purpose of the present study is to derive the pointer states of a macroscopic system interacting with its environment, under the general assumptions, i.e., without assuming any form of the interaction Hamiltonian. The lowest order perturbation leads that the interaction energy shifts the phase factors of the state vectors. For a macroscopic system, these factors are the macroscopic quantities even for the very weak interaction. When we group the state vector of the total system by the view point of environmental side, the destructive interference occurs and the stationary phase approximation can be adopted. Only the pointer states then survive and the decoherence also occurs. The present approach is within the standard quantum mechanics as same as the standard decoherence theory, but the meaning of the classical state is much clear.