Fragility of the Schrödinger Cat in thermal environments

Abstract

We describe the decoherence instability of Schrödinger Cat states in the two-site Bose-Hubbard model with an attractive on-site interaction between particles. For N particles with onsite attractive energy U and hopping amplitude between sites t, Cat states exist for uequiv frac{UN}{2t}<-1 at zero temperature. However, they are increasingly unstable to small thermal fluctuations as the Cat itself is increasingly well-defined and its components become well-separated. For any given u<-1, the decoherence temperature becomes smaller for large N. The loss of off-diagonal coherence peaks in the equilibrium density matrix is dominated by the thermal admixture of the first excited state of the many-body system with its ground state. Particle number fluctuations, described in the grand canonical ensemble also reduce coherence, but to a lesser degree than thermal fluctuations. The full density matrix of the Schrödinger Cat is obtained by exact numerical diagonalization of the many-body Hamiltonian and a narrow regime in the parameter space of the particle number, temperature, and U/t is identified where small Cat states may survive decoherence in a physical environment.