Anomalous Decay and Decoherence in Atomic Gases

Abstract

Pair collisions in atomic gases lead to decoherence and decay. Assuming that all the atoms in the gas are equally likely to collide one is led to consider Lindbladian of mean field type where the evolution in the limit of many atoms reduces to a single qudit Lindbladian with quadratic nonlinearity. We describe three smoking guns for nonlinear evolutions: power law decay and dephasing rates; dephasing rates that take a continuous range of values depending on the initial data and finally, anomalous flow of the Bloch ball towards a hemisphere.