Characterization of a qubit in presence of dissipation and external driving

Abstract

In this PhD thesis we have been concerned with dissipative and decoherence processes which take place specifically for quantum systems in a dissipative bistable potential. This potential describes a Hamiltonian system whose spectrum is composed by a ladder of levels, grouped as doublets under the potential barrier and being almost equally spaced above it. The system interacts with a thermal environment, fully characterized by the so-called bath spectral density. The dynamical quantity we looked at is the so-called reduced density matrix (RDM), obtained by tracing out the full density matrix the environmental degrees of freedom. The matrix elements for the RDM are exactly evaluated by means of the Feynman-Vernon real-time path-integral technique. Depending on which regime of parameters we are interested in, i.e. temperature and coupling strength with the reservoir, a few or several energy levels contribute to the dynamics. In particular, a two-level system (TLS) is first analyzed, corresponding to the regime where only the lowest doublet is energetically accessible. We discussed in the beginning the case of a TLS interacting with Ohmic and super-Ohmic baths and then the situation in which a symmetric TLS is assumed to be coupled with an external detector, like a dc-SQUID, the latter being coupled to an Ohmic environment. This model provides a better description of a real qubit, as frequently discussed in various experiments. In the former case, we developed a theory called Weakly-Interacting Blip Approximation (WIBA), which is nonperturbative in the coupling strength as well as in the tunneling frequency and gives reliable results over a wide range of temperatures and coupling strength to the thermal environment. In the latter case, the dynamics was evaluated upon starting from the Non-Interacting Blip Approximation (NIBA) and approximating the NIBA kernels up to first order in the detector-bath coupling strength. Analytical results, valid also at finite detuning, were obtained and we showed that our theory correctly reproduces the onset of multiple oscillation frequencies in the dynamics due to the entanglement between TLS and detector. Finally, we discussed the more general case of an M-level system coupled with an Ohmic environment. This situation describes the case of a bistable potential where the temperature is high enough that higher-lying energy levels are being populated and the system cannot be reduced to a simple TLS. Many are the experimental situations which can be described by our theory. We developed a novel approximation called Weakly-Interacting VR-Blip Approximation (VR-WIBA) for the dynamics in a driven dissipative bistable potential. In the regimes of low to moderate temperatures and coupling strengths, we exploited a separation of time scales between tunneling and vibrational relaxation events and we could derive analytical kernels for the intra- and inter-well dynamics.