Decoherence Length Research Articles

Aspects of gravitational decoherence in neutrino lensing

We study decoherence effects in neutrino flavour oscillations in curved spacetime with particular emphasis on the lensing in a Schwarzschild geometry. Assuming Gaussian wave packets for neutrinos, we argue that the decoherence length derived from the exponential suppression of the flavour transition amplitude depends on the proper time of the geodesic connecting the events of the production and detection in general gravitational setting. In the weak gravity limit, the proper time between two events of given proper distance is smaller than that in the flat spacetime. Therefore, in presence of a Schwarzschild object, the neutrino wave packets have to travel relatively more physical distance in space to lapse the same amount of proper time before they decoher. For non-radial propagation applicable to the lensing phenomena, we show that the decoherence, in general, is sensitive to the absolute values of neutrino masses as well as the classical trajectories taken by neutrinos between the source and detector along with the spatial widths of neutrino wave packets. At distances beyond the decoherence length, the probability of neutrino flavour transition due to lensing attains a value which depends only on the leptonic mixing parameters. Hence, the observability of neutrino lensing significantly depends on these parameters and in-turn the lensing can provide useful information about them.

The Cosmological Constant From Planckian Fluctuations and the Averaging Procedure

In this paper I continue the investigation in \cite{1,1b} concerning my proposal on the nature of the cosmological constant. In particular, I study both mathematically and physically the quantum Planckian context and I provide, in order to depict quantum fluctuations and in absence of a complete quantum gravity theory, a semiclassical solution where an effective inhomogeneous metric at Planckian scales or above is averaged. In such a framework, a generalization of the well known Buchert formalism \cite{2} is obtained with the foliation in terms of the mean value $s(\hat{t})$ of the time operator $\hat{t}$ in a maximally localizing state $\{s\}$ of a quantum spacetime \cite{3,4,5,6} and in a cosmological context \cite{7}. As a result, after introducing a decoherence length scale $L_D$ where quantum fluctuations are averaged on, a classical de Sitter universe emerges with a small cosmological constant depending on $L_D$ and frozen in a true vacuum state (lowest energy), provided that the kinematical backreaction is negligible at that scale $L_D$. Finally, I analyse the case with a non-vanishing initial spatial curvature $\mathcal{R}$ showing that, for a reasonable large class of models, spatial curvature and kinematical backreation $\mathcal{Q}$ are suppressed by the dynamical evolution of the spacetime.

Nonequilibrium distribution functions in electron transport: decoherence, energy redistribution and dissipation

A new statistical model for the combined effects of decoherence, energy redistribution and dissipation on electron transport in large quantum systems is introduced. The essential idea is to consider the electron phase information to be lost only at randomly chosen regions with an average distance corresponding to the decoherence length. In these regions the electron's energy can be unchanged or redistributed within the electron system or dissipated to a heat bath. The different types of scattering and the decoherence leave distinct fingerprints in the energy distribution functions. They can be interpreted as a mixture of unthermalized and thermalized electrons. In the case of weak decoherence, the fraction of thermalized electrons show electrical and thermal contact resistances. In the regime of incoherent transport the proposed model is equivalent to a Boltzmann equation. The model is applied to experiments with carbon nanotubes. The excellent agreement of the model with the experimental data allows to determine the scattering lengths of the system.

Stochastic modification of the Schrödinger-Newton equation

The Schr\"odinger-Newton (SN) equation describes the effect of self-gravity on the evolution of a quantum system, and it has been proposed that gravitationally induced decoherence drives the system to one of the stationary solutions of the SN equation. However, the equation itself lacks a decoherence mechanism, because it does not possess any stochastic feature. In the present work we derive a stochastic modification of the Schr\"odinger-Newton equation, starting from the Einstein-Langevin equation in the theory of stochastic semiclassical gravity. We specialize this equation to the case of a single massive point particle, and by using Karolyhazy's phase variance method, we derive the Di\'osi-Penrose criterion for the decoherence time. We obtain a (nonlinear) master equation corresponding to this stochastic SN equation. This equation is, however, linear at the level of the approximation we use to prove decoherence; hence, the no-signaling requirement is met. Lastly, we use physical arguments to obtain expressions for the decoherence length of extended objects.

Paraxial Coupling of Propagating Modes in Three-Dimensional Waveguides with Random Boundaries

We analyze long range wave propagation in three-dimensional random waveguides. The waves are trapped by top and bottom boundaries, but the medium is unbounded in the two remaining directions. We consider scalar waves, and motivated by applications in underwater acoustics, we take a pressure release boundary condition at the top surface and a rigid bottom boundary. The wave speed in the waveguide is known, but the top boundary has small random fluctuations that cause significant cumulative scattering of the waves over long distances of propagation. To quantify the scattering effects, we study the evolution of the random amplitudes of the waveguide modes. We obtain that in the long range limit they satisfy a system of paraxial equations driven by a Brownian field. We use this system to estimate three important mode-dependent scales: the scattering mean free path, the cross-range decoherence length, and the decoherence frequency. Understanding these scales is important in imaging and communication problems, because they encode the cumulative scattering effects in the wave field measured by remote sensors. As an application of the theory, we analyze time reversal and coherent interferometric imaging in strong cumulative scattering regimes.

Cross Correlation and Deconvolution of Noise Signals in Randomly Layered Media

It is known that cross correlation of waves generated by noise sources, propagating in an unknown medium and recorded by a sensor array, can provide information about the medium. In this paper the medium is a three-dimensional small-scale randomly layered medium with slow macroscopic variations. The main objective here is to set forth a framework for analysis of cross correlations of waves generated by noise sources and propagating in such a medium and, moreover, to use this framework to design estimators for macroscale medium features. The noise sources are located at the bottom of a random medium slab and generate a random wave field that is scattered by the rapid random fluctuations of the medium and then recorded at the surface. Taking into account the pressure release boundary conditions at the surface, this situation corresponds to the so-called daylight configuration. The analysis is carried out in the asymptotic framework where the typical wavelength is small compared to the scale of the macroscopic variations of the background medium and large compared to the decoherence length of the microscopic random fluctuations of the medium. It is shown that the cross correlation of the waves recorded at the surface contains statistically stable information about the macroscopic background medium.

Multipartite entangled states in particle mixing

In the physics of flavor mixing, the flavor states are given by superpositions of mass eigenstates. By using the occupation number to define a multiqubit space, the flavor states can be interpreted as multipartite mode-entangled states. By exploiting a suitable global measure of entanglement, based on the entropies related to all possible bipartitions of the system, we analyze the correlation properties of such states in the instances of three- and four-flavor mixing. Depending on the mixing parameters, and, in particular, on the values taken by the free phases, responsible for the CP-violation, entanglement concentrates in certain bipartitions. We quantify in detail the amount and the distribution of entanglement in the physically relevant cases of flavor mixing in quark and neutrino systems. By using the wave packet description for localized particles, we use the global measure of entanglement, suitably adapted for the instance of multipartite mixed states, to analyze the decoherence, induced by the free evolution dynamics, on the quantum correlations of stationary neutrino beams. We define a decoherence length as the distance associated with the vanishing of the coherent interference effects among massive neutrino states. We investigate the role of the CP-violating phase in the decoherence process.

Fractional quantum Hall effect atν=5∕2: Ground states, non-Abelian quasiholes, and edge modes in a microscopic model

We present a comprehensive numerical study of a microscopic model of the fractional quantum Hall system at filling fraction $\ensuremath{\nu}=5∕2$, based on the disk geometry. Our model includes Coulomb interaction and a semirealistic confining potential. We also mix in a three-body interaction in some cases to help elucidate the physics. We obtain a phase diagram, discuss the conditions under which the ground state can be described by the Moore-Read state, and study its competition with neighboring stripe phases. We also study quasihole excitations and edge excitations in the Moore-Read-like state. From the evolution of the edge spectrum, we obtain the velocities of the charge and neutral edge modes, which turn out to be very different. This separation of velocities is a source of decoherence for a non-Abelian quasihole and/or quasiparticle (with charge $\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}e∕4$) when propagating at the edge; using numbers obtained from a specific set of parameters, we estimate the decoherence length to be around $4\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{m}$. This sets an upper bound for the separation of the two point contacts in a double point-contact interferometer, designed to detect the non-Abelian nature of such quasiparticles. We also find a state that is a potential candidate for the recently proposed anti-Pfaffian state. We find the speculated anti-Pfaffian state is favored in weak confinement (smooth edge), while the Moore-Read Pfaffian state is favored in strong confinement (sharp edge).

Coherent interferometric imaging in clutter

Coherent interferometry is an array-imaging method in which we back-propagate, or migrate, crosscorrelations of the traces over appropriately chosen space-time windows rather than the traces themselves. The size of the space-time windows is critical and depends on two parameters. One is the decoherence frequency, which is proportional to the reciprocal of the delay spread in the traces produced by the clutter. The other is the decoherence length, which also depends on the clutter. As is usual, the clutter is modeled by random fluctuations in the medium properties. In isotropic clutter, the decoherence length is typically much shorter than the array aperture. In layered random media, the decoherence length along the layers can be quite long. We show that when the crosscorrelations of the traces are calculated adaptively, coherent interferometry can provide images that are statistically stable relative to small-scale clutter in the environment. This means that the images we obtain are not sensitive to the detailed form of the clutter. They only depend on its overall statistical properties. However, clutter does reduce the resolution of the images by blurring. We show how the amount of blurring can be minimized by using adaptive interferometric imaging algorithms and discuss the relation between the coherence properties of the array data and the loss in resolution caused by the blurring.

Time reversal of parabolic waves and two-frequency Wigner distribution

We consider propagation and time reversal of wave pulses in a random environment. The focus of our analysis is the development of an expression for the two frequency mutual coherence function for the harmonic wave field. This quantity plays a crucial role in the analysis of many wave propagation phenomena and we illustrate by explicitly considering time reversal in the context of time pulses with a high carrier frequency. In a time-reversal experiment the wave received by an active transducer or antenna (receiver-emitter) array, is recorded in a finite time window and then re-emitted into the medium time reversed, that is, the tails of the recorded signals are sent first. The re-emitted wave pulse will focus approximately on the original source location. We use explicit expressions for the mutual coherence functions and their asymptotic approximations in the regime of long or short propagation distance and a high carrier frequency to analyze the refocusing of the wave pulse in the time reversal experiment. A novel aspect of our analysis is that we are able to characterize precisely the decoherence length in temporal frequency. This allows us to analyze for instance the time reversal experiment when the mirror has a finite aperture in time.

Effects of Quantum and Thermal Fluctuations on the Stability of Mutual Phase-Locking in Long Josephson Junction Stacks

We report the effects of quantum and thermal fluctuations on the stability of phase-locking in one-dimensional long Josephson junction (LJJ) devices, involving high temperature superconductors. Accounting for both the magnetic induction effect and the charging effect, we determine the zero temperature (T = 0) stability phase diagram using renormalization group (RG) analysis. This phase diagram shows that the in-phase mode is stable but some out-of-phase modes are unstable against quantum fluctuations. At finite T, all stable phase-locked modes (at T = 0) are unstable, but its stability is maintained within the decoherence length which decreases inversely with T.

Weak antilocalization and UCFs in an open bismuth quantum dot

We report on the observation of weak antilocalization and universal conductance fluctuations in the magnetoconductance of an open quasi-ballistic bismuth nano-cavity. The electron decoherence length is comparable to sample dimensions at low temperature, while the spin–orbit coupling length is smaller. The temperature dependence of both the conductance and the dephasing length are consistent with two-dimensional electron–electron interactions being the dominant decoherence process.

Critical currents and the Ambegaokar-Baratoff to Ginsburg-Landau crossover in granular superconductors

A simple expression for the transport critical current, which describes rather well the Ambegaokar-Baratoff (A-B) to Ginsburg-Landau (G-L) crossover, is obtained from an elementary analysis of a Josephson junction subject to external magnetic fields within the Ginsburg-Landau theory. We show that the order parameter in the intergrain region depends crucially on the interplay of two characteristic lengths: the superconducting coherence length $\ensuremath{\xi}\ensuremath{\propto}(1\ensuremath{-}{T/T}_{c}{)}^{\ensuremath{-}1/2}$ and the junction-induced superconducting decoherence length ${\ensuremath{\zeta}}_{q}\ensuremath{\propto}(1\ensuremath{-}{T/T}_{c}{)}^{\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\alpha}}.$ Data for the transport critical current in granular YBCO samples are presented, and the A-B to G-L crossovers successfully described.