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Physical Review A

Decoherence induced by a composite environment

Adam Zaman Chaudhry, Jiangbin Gong

Published Jan 31, 2014• 10 citations
Publisher

Abstract

It is not always justified to model the environment of a realistic quantum system as a collection of harmonic oscillators or two-level systems. To explore interesting physics associated with a composite environment, here we study the dynamics of a qubit coupled to a second two-level system, which is in turn coupled to a harmonic-oscillator bath. That is, the qubit of interest is in the presence of a composite environment consisting of the second two-level system and a conventional harmonic-oscillator bath. We investigate the issue of pointer states of decoherence for the qubit for different coupling strengths between the qubit and such a composite environment. It is shown that for weak-, intermediate-, or strong-coupling strengths, the qubit's reduced density matrix has a coupling-strength-dependent diagonal representation, thus yielding coupling-strength-dependent computational pointer states. Interestingly, the associated decoherence rate can decrease as the coupling strength increases.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.89.014104

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It is not always justified to model the environment of a realistic quantum system as a collection of harmonic oscillators or two-level systems. To explore interesting physics associated with a composite environment, here we study the dynamics of a qubit coupled to a second two-level system, which is in turn coupled to a harmonic-oscillator bath. That is, the qubit of interest is in the presence of a composite environment consisting of the second two-level system and a conventional harmonic-oscillator bath. We investigate the issue of pointer states of decoherence for the qubit for different coupling strengths between the qubit and such a composite environment. It is shown that for weak-, intermediate-, or strong-coupling strengths, the qubit's reduced density matrix has a coupling-strength-dependent diagonal representation, thus yielding coupling-strength-dependent computational pointer states. Interestingly, the associated decoherence rate can decrease as the coupling strength increases.
We study a model of dephasing (decoherence) in a two-state quantum system (qubit) coupled to a bath of harmonic oscillators. An exact analytic solution for the reduced dynamics of a two-state system in this model has been obtained previously for factorizing initial states of the combined system. We show that the model admits exact solutions for a large class of correlated initial states which are typical in the theory of quantum measurements. We derive exact expressions for the off-diagonal elements of the qubit density matrix, which hold for an arbitrary strength of coupling between the qubit and the bath. The influence of initial correlations on decoherence is considered for different bath spectral densities. Time behavior of the qubit entropy in the decoherence process is discussed.
We derive and analyze the Born-Markov master equation for a quantum harmonic oscillator interacting with a bath of independent two-level systems. This hitherto virtually unexplored model plays a fundamental role as one of the four ``canonical'' system-environment models for decoherence and dissipation. To investigate the influence of further couplings of the environmental spins to a dissipative bath, we also derive the master equation for a harmonic oscillator interacting with a single spin coupled to a bosonic bath. Our models are experimentally motivated by quantum-electromechanical systems and micron-scale ion traps. Decoherence and dissipation rates are found to exhibit temperature dependencies significantly different from those in quantum Brownian motion. In particular, the systematic dissipation rate for the central oscillator decreases with increasing temperature and goes to zero at zero temperature, but there also exists a temperature-independent momentum-diffusion (heating) rate.
We study the bath dynamics in the dephasing model of a two-state quantum system (qubit) coupled to an environment of harmonic oscillators.This model was shown [Morozov et al., Phys.Rev. A, 2012 85, 022101] to admit the analytic solution for the qubit and environment dynamics.Using this solution, we derive the exact expression for the bath reduced density matrix in the presence of initial qubit-environment correlations.We obtain the non-equilibrium phonon distribution function and discuss in detail the time behavior of the bath energy.It is shown that only the inclusion of dynamic correlations between the qubit and the bath ensures the proper time behavior of the quantity which may be interpreted as the "environment energy".
We investigate the non-dissipative decoherence of three qubit system obtained by manipulating the state of a trapped two-level ion coupled to an optical cavity. Modelling the environment as a set of noninteracting harmonic oscillators, analytical expressions for the state operator of tripartite composite system, the probability of generating maximally entangled GHZ state, and the population inversion have been obtained. The pointer observable is the energy of the isolated quantum system. Coupling to environment results in exponential decay of off diagonal matrix elements of the state operator with time as well as a phase decoherence of the component states. Numerical calculations to examine the time evolution of GHZ state generation probability and population inversion for different system environment coupling strengths are performed. Using negativity as an entanglement measure and linear entropy as a measure of mixedness, the entanglement dynamics of the tripartite system in the presence of decoherence is analysed.
We consider the interaction of a quantum system (spin-12)\frac{1}{2})21​) with a macroscopic quantum apparatus (harmonic oscillator) which in turn is coupled to a bath of harmonic oscillators. Exact solutions of the Markovian master equation show that the reduced density matrix of the system-apparatus combination decoheres to a statistical mixture where up and down spins eventually correlate with pointer states of the apparatus (harmonic oscillator), with associated probabilities in accordance with quantum principles. For the zero-temperature bath these pointer states turn out to be coherent states of the harmonic oscillator (apparatus) for arbitrary initial states of the apparatus. Further, we see that the decoherence time is inversely proportional to the square of the separation between the two coherent states with which the spins correlate. For a high-temperature bath, pointer states no longer remain coherent states but are Gaussian distributions (generalized coherent states). Spin up and down states of the system now correlate with nearly diagonal distributions in position of these generalized coherent states. The diagonalization in position increases with the temperature of the bath. The off-diagonal elements in spin space decohere over a time scale which goes inversely as the square of the separation between the peaks of the two position distributions that correlate with the spin states. Zurek's earlier approximate result for the decoherence time is consistent with our exact results. Our analysis brings out the importance of looking at a measurementlike scenario where definite correlations are established between the system and apparatus to determine the nature of the pointer basis of the apparatus. Further, our exact results demonstrate in an unambiguous way that the pointer states in this measurement model emerge independent of the initial state of the apparatus.
One of the main obstacles toward building efficient quantum computing systems is decoherence, where the inevitable interaction between the qubits and the surrounding environment leads to a vanishing entanglement. We consider a system of two interacting asymmetric two-level atoms (qubits) in the presence of pure and correlated dephasing environments. We study the dynamics of entanglement while varying the interaction strength between the two qubits, their relative frequencies, and their coupling strength to the environment starting from different initial states of practical interest. The impact of the asymmetry of the two qubits, reflected in their different frequencies and coupling strengths to the environment, varies significantly depending on the initial state of the system and its degree of anisotropy. For an initial disentangled, or a Werner, state, as the difference between the frequencies increases, the entanglement decay rate increases, with more persistence at the higher degrees of anisotropy in the former state. However, for an initial anti-correlated Bell state, the entanglement decays more rapidly in the symmetric case compared with the asymmetric one. The difference in the coupling strengths of the two qubits to the pure (uncorrelated) dephasing environment leads to higher entanglement decay in the different initial state cases, though the rate varies depending on the degree of anisotropy and the initial state. Interestingly, the correlated dephasing environment, within a certain range, was found to enhance the entanglement dynamics starting from certain initial states, such as the disentangled, anti-correlated Bell, and Werner, whereas it exhibits a decaying effect in other cases such as the initial correlated Bell state.