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arXiv:quant-ph/0608181 · Physical Review Letters

Decoherence and Thermalization

Marco Merkli, Israel Michael Sigal, G. P. Berman

Published Mar 26, 2007• 56 citations
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Abstract

We present a rigorous analysis of the phenomenon of decoherence for general N-level systems coupled to reservoirs of free massless bosonic fields. We apply our general results to the specific case of the qubit. Our approach does not involve master equation approximations and applies to a wide variety of systems which are not explicitly solvable.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.98.130401

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We present a rigorous analysis of the phenomenon of decoherence for general N-level systems coupled to reservoirs of free massless bosonic fields. We apply our general results to the specific case of the qubit. Our approach does not involve master equation approximations and applies to a wide variety of systems which are not explicitly solvable.
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We describe our recent results on the resonant perturbation theory of decoherence and relaxation for quantum systems with many qubits. The approach represents a rigorous analysis of the phenomenon of decoherence and relaxation for general N‐level systems coupled to reservoirs of bosonic fields. We derive a representation of the reduced dynamics valid for all times t ≥ 0 and for small but fixed interaction strength. Our approach does not involve master equation approximations and applies to a wide variety of systems which are not explicitly solvable.
In this paper we detail some results advanced in a recent letter [Prado et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 073008 (2009).] showing how to engineer reservoirs for two-level systems at absolute zero by means of a time-dependent master equation leading to a nonstationary superposition equilibrium state. We also present a general recipe showing how to build nonadiabatic coherent evolutions of a fermionic system interacting with a bosonic mode and investigate the influence of thermal reservoirs at finite temperature on the fidelity of the protected superposition state. Our analytical results are supported by numerical analysis of the full Hamiltonian model.
We study the quantum dynamics of an open network of two-level systems which is coupled to a correlated common environment represented by a bosonic field in a thermal equilibrium state. Extensive numerical simulations of the full second-order time-convolutionless quantum master equation for the density matrix of various types of networks are performed, in order to investigate dissipation and decoherence processes and, in particular, their dependence on the spatial separation of the network sites and on the speed of the bosonic field modes. In the limit of an infinite speed the influence of the environment disappears due to the emergence of a decoherence-free subspace, while the limit of zero speed corresponds to the case in which the network sites are coupled to independent reservoirs, a case which is much easier to treat numerically. The main result of the paper is a general intuitive criterion which states that the simpler model of independent reservoirs can be used as long as the network relaxation time is smaller than the time it takes for the modes to travel the minimal distance between the network sites.