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arXiv:quant-ph/0009003 · Physical Review A

Decoherence, correlation, and entanglement in a pair of coupled quantum dissipative oscillators

A. K. Rajagopal, R. W. Rendell

Published Jan 18, 2001• 59 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

A pair of coupled quantum dissipative oscillators, serving as a model for a nanosystem, is described here by the Lindblad equation. Its dynamic evolution is shown to exhibit the features of decoherence (spatial extent of quantum behavior), correlation (spatial scale over which the system localizes to its physical dimensions), and mixed-state entanglement (or inseparability, a special quantum feature in the case of pure states making its appearance first in bipartite systems) as a function of the coupling constants of the Lindblad equation. One interesting feature of this calculation is that the mixed-state separable entanglement may exhibit revivals in time. An initially inseparable entangled state need not remain so for all time and may exhibit regions of separable entanglement. Interpreting the parameters of the Lindblad theory as environmental features in certain experimental situations gives us clues as to the possible control of decoherence, correlation, and nature of entanglement.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.63.022116

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A pair of coupled quantum dissipative oscillators, serving as a model for a nanosystem, is described here by the Lindblad equation. Its dynamic evolution is shown to exhibit the features of decoherence (spatial extent of quantum behavior), correlation (spatial scale over which the system localizes to its physical dimensions), and mixed-state entanglement (or inseparability, a special quantum feature in the case of pure states making its appearance first in bipartite systems) as a function of the coupling constants of the Lindblad equation. One interesting feature of this calculation is that the mixed-state separable entanglement may exhibit revivals in time. An initially inseparable entangled state need not remain so for all time and may exhibit regions of separable entanglement. Interpreting the parameters of the Lindblad theory as environmental features in certain experimental situations gives us clues as to the possible control of decoherence, correlation, and nature of entanglement.
In a dissipative regime, we study the properties of several qubits coupled to a driven resonator in the framework of a Jaynes-Cummings model. The time evolution and the steady state of the system are numerically analyzed within the Lindblad master equation, with up to several million components. Two semi-analytical approaches, at weak and strong (semiclassical) dissipations, are developed to describe the steady state of this system and determine its validity by comparing it with the Lindblad equation results. We show that the synchronization of several qubits with the driving phase can be obtained due to their coupling to the resonator. We establish the existence of two different qubit synchronization regimes: In the first one, the semiclassical approach describes well the dynamics of qubits and, thus, their quantum features and entanglement are suppressed by dissipation and the synchronization is essentially classical. In the second one, the entangled steady state of a pair of qubits remains synchronized in the presence of dissipation and decoherence, corresponding to the regime non-existent in classical synchronization.
We investigate system-environment correlations based on the exact dynamics of a qubit and its environment in the framework of pure decoherence (phase damping). We focus on the relation of decoherence and the buildup of system-reservoir entanglement for an arbitrary (possibly mixed) initial qubit state. In the commonly employed regime where the qubit dynamics can be described by a Markov master equation of the Lindblad type, we find that for almost all qubit initial states inside the Bloch sphere, decoherence is complete while the total state is still separable---no entanglement is involved. In general, both ``separable'' and ``entangling'' decoherence occurs, depending on the temperature and initial qubit state. Moreover, we find situations where classical and quantum correlations periodically alternate as a function of time in the regime of low temperatures.
The Lindblad master equation is widely used to describe the reduced dynamics of open quantum systems under Markovian assumptions. Here, we investigate its ability to reproduce the reduced evolution emerging from a microscopic many-body model in which two interacting two-level subsystems are embedded in a larger environment and evolve under fully unitary dynamics. The exact evolution exhibits a clear separation of timescales. At short times, decoherence arises from environmentally induced dephasing, leading to a Gaussian suppression of coherences and a quadratic decay of purity. At intermediate times, collective decoherence channels saturate and a slower, still Gaussian, decay driven by relative environmental fluctuations dominates. At later times the system settles in a complete decohered state. The first two behaviors cannot be reproduced by a Lindblad dynamics with constant coefficients, which always results in an exponential decay: Our work provides a simple example of the breakdown of the effective description relevant in many realistic settings.
In the framework of the theory of open systems based on completely positive quantum dynamical semigroups, we study the continuous variable entanglement for a system consisting of two independent harmonic oscillators interacting with a general environment. We solve the Kossakowski-Lindblad master equation for the time evolution of the considered system and describe the entanglement in terms of the covariance matrix for an arbitrary Gaussian input state. Using Peres–Simon necessary and sufficient criterion for separability of two-mode Gaussian states, we show that for certain values of diffusion and dissipation coefficients describing the environment, the state keeps for all times its initial type: separable or entangled. In other cases, entanglement generation, entanglement sudden death or a periodic collapse and revival of entanglement take place. We analyze also the time evolution of the logarithmic negativity, which characterizes the degree of entanglement of the quantum state.
We investigate how to model Markovian evolution of coupled harmonic oscillators, each of them interacting with a local environment. When the coupling between the oscillators is weak, dissipation may be modeled using local Lindblad terms for each of the oscillators in the master equation, as is commonly done. When the coupling between oscillators is strong, this model may become invalid. We derive a master equation for two coupled harmonic oscillators that are subject to individual heat baths modeled by a collection of harmonic oscillators and show that this master equation in general contains nonlocal Lindblad terms. We compare the resulting time evolution with that obtained for dissipation through local Lindblad terms for each individual oscillator and show that the evolution is different in the two cases. In particular, the two descriptions give different predictions for the steady state and for the entanglement between strongly coupled oscillators. This shows that when describing strongly coupled harmonic oscillators, one must take great care in how dissipation is modeled and that a description using local Lindblad terms may fail. This may be particularly relevant when attempting to generate entangled states of strongly coupled quantum systems.
We investigate the quantum-classical border, the entanglement and decoherence of an analytically solvable model, comprising a first subsystem (a harmonic oscillator) coupled to a driven and damped second subsystem (another harmonic oscillator). We choose initial states whose dynamics is confined to a couple of two-level systems, and show that the maximum value of entanglement between the two subsystems, as measured by concurrence, depends on the dissipation rate to the coupling-constant ratio and the initial state. While in a related model the entropy of the first subsystem (a two-level system) never grows appreciably (for large dissipation rates), in our model it reaches a maximum before decreasing. Although both models predict small values of entanglement and dissipation, for fixed times of the order of the inverse of the coupling constant and large dissipation rates, these quantities decrease faster, as a function of the ratio of the dissipation rate to the coupling constant, in our model.