Noise and decoherence

Rouhollah Jafari, Ali Asadian, Mehdi Abdi +1 more

We analyze the decoherence dynamics of a central spin coupled to a spin chain with a time-dependent noisy magnetic field, focusing on how noise influences the system's decoherence. Our results show that decoherence due to the nonequilibrium critical dynamics of the environment is amplified in the presence of uncorrelated and correlated Gaussian noise. We demonstrate that decoherence factor consistently signals the critical points, and exhibits exponential scaling with the system size, the square of noise intensity, and the noise correlation time at the critical points. We find that strong coupling between the qubit and the environment leads to partial revivals of decoherence, which diminish with increasing noise intensity or decreasing noise correlation time. In contrast, weak coupling leads to monotonic enhanced decoherence. The numerical results illustrate that, the revivals decay and scale exponentially with noise intensity. Moreover, the revivals increase and indicate linear or power law scaling with noise correlation time depending on how the correlated noise is fast or slow. Additionally, we explore the non-Markovianity of the dynamics, finding that it decays in the presence of noise but increases as the noise correlation time grows.

D. Dubbers, H.‐J. Stöckmann

Bing Gu, Ignacio Franco

Quantum decoherence arises due to uncontrollable entanglement between a system and its environment. However, the effects of decoherence are often thought of and modeled through a simpler picture in which the role of the environment is to introduce classical noise in the system's degrees of freedom. Here, we establish necessary conditions that the classical noise models need to satisfy to quantitatively model the decoherence. Specifically, for pure-dephasing processes, we identify well-defined statistical properties for the noise that are determined by the quantum many-point time correlation function of the environmental operators that enter into the system-bath interaction. In particular, for the exemplifying spin-boson problem with a Lorentz-Drude spectral density, we show that the high-temperature quantum decoherence is quantitatively mimicked by colored Gaussian noise. In turn, for dissipative environments, we show that classical noise models cannot describe decoherence effects due to relaxation through spontaneous emission of photons/phonons. These developments provide a rigorous platform to assess the validity of classical noise models of decoherence.

Robin Blume-Kohout

M. Mehring, V.A. Weberruß

Peihao Huang, Neil M. Zimmerman, Garnett W. Bryant

Abstract Rapid progress in semiconductor spin qubits has enabled experimental demonstrations of a two-qubit logic gate. Understanding spin decoherence in a two-qubit logic gate is necessary for optimal qubit operation. We study spin decoherence due to 1/f charge noise for two electrons in a double quantum dot used for a two-qubit controlled-phase gate. In contrast to the usual belief, spin decoherence can be dominated by the tunneling noise from 1/f charge noise instead of the detuning noise. Tunneling noise can dominate because the effect of tunneling noise on the spin qubit is first order in the charge admixture; while the effect of the detuning noise is only second order. The different orders of contributions result in different detuning dependence of the decoherence, which provides a way to identify the noise source. We find that decoherence in a recent two-qubit experiment was dominated by the tunneling noise from 1/f charge noise. The results illustrate the importance of considering tunneling noise to design optimal operation of spin qubits.