Decoherence Rate Research Articles

Study of Atomic Populations, Electromagnetically Induced Transparency, and Dispersive Signals in a λ-Type System Under Various Decoherence Effects

We have theoretically studied the atomic populations, electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), and dispersion in a three-level Λ-type system. The density matrix equations are set up with regard for the relaxation of populations of the ground states, and the optical Bloch equations are solved analytically in the weak probe field approximation. Decoherence effects in the ground and excited states on the EIT line shape and dispersive signals are studied, and it is found that the EIT line width increases and the peak height decreases, as the decoherence rates increase in the ground and excited states. On the other hand, we have observed that the dispersive signals are steeper and of high contrast for the lower decoherence rates in the ground and excited states. We have also analyzed the variations of atomic populations of the energy levels at the pump Rabi frequency, as well as the decoherence rate in the ground state.

Improving quantum parameter estimation by monitoring quantum trajectories

Quantum-enhanced parameter estimation has widespread applications in many fields. An important issue is to protect the estimation precision against the noise-induced decoherence. Here we develop a general theoretical framework for improving the precision for estimating an arbitrary parameter by monitoring the noise-induced quantum trajectorie (MQT) and establish its connections to the purification-based approach to quantum parameter estimation. MQT can be achieved in two ways: (i) Any quantum trajectories can be monitored by directly monitoring the environment, which is experimentally challenging for realistic noises; (ii) Certain quantum trajectories can also be monitored by frequently measuring the quantum probe alone via ancilla-assisted encoding and error detection. This establishes an interesting connection between MQT and the full quantum error correction protocol. Application of MQT to estimate the level splitting and decoherence rate of a spin-1/2 under typical decoherence channels demonstrate that it can avoid the long-time exponential loss of the estimation precision and, in special cases, recover the Heisenberg scaling.

Local-Field Corrections as a Regularization Method for the Spin-Boson Model

The decoherence rate of a ‘central spin’ in a bosonic bath of magnetic fluctuations is computed using the spin-boson model. The magnetic fluctuations are treated in a fully quantum mechanical way by using the macroscopic quantum electrodynamics formalism and are expressed in terms of the classical electromagnetic Green’s function of the system. The resulting frequency integral formally diverges but it can be regularized by applying real-cavity, local-field corrections to the location of the ‘central spin’. This results in a cut-off function in terms of the magnetic permeability of the background material that leads to convergence at both high and low frequencies. This cut-off function appears naturally from the formalism and thus removes the need to rely on ad-hoc arguments to justify the form of the cut-off function. Furthermore, the magnetic permeability and the nature of interactions in quantum electrodynamics illuminate the connection between the two main models of ‘central spin’ decoherence, the spin-boson model and the spin-bath model, demonstrating how the two very different models are able to correctly model the same underlying physics.

Decoherence of black hole superpositions by Hawking radiation

An environment interacting with a system acquires information about it, e.g. about its location. The resulting decoherence is thought to be responsible for the emergence of the classical realm of our Universe out of the quantum substrate. However, this view of the emergence of the classical is sometimes dismissed as a consequence of insufficient isolation and, hence, as non-fundamental. In contrast to many other systems, a black hole can never be isolated from its Hawking radiation which carries information about its location, making this lack of isolation fundamental. Here we consider the decoherence of a “black hole Schrödinger cat”—a non-local superposition of a Schwarzschild black hole in two distinct locations—due to its Hawking radiation. The resulting decoherence rate turns out to be given by a surprisingly simple equation. Moreover, and in contrast to known cases of decoherence, this rate does not involve Planck’s constant ħ.

Extreme Decoherence and Quantum Chaos.

We study the ultimate limits to the decoherence rate associated with dephasing processes. Fluctuating chaotic quantum systems are shown to exhibit extreme decoherence, with a rate that scales exponentially with the particle number, thus exceeding the polynomial dependence of systems with fluctuating k-body interactions. Our findings suggest the use of quantum chaotic systems as a natural test bed for spontaneous wave function collapse models. We further discuss the implications on the decoherence of AdS/CFT black holes resulting from the unitarity loss associated with energy dephasing.

Cyclic Hybrid Double-Channel Quantum Communication via Bell-State and GHZ-State in Noisy Environments

In this paper, a scheme for cyclic hybrid double-channel quantum communication is proposed by using the product state of three Bell states and three Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states as the quantum channel. It shows that Alice teleports a single-qubit state to Bob and prepares a single-qubit state for Charlie, Bob teleports a single-qubit state to Charlie and prepares a single-qubit state for Alice, while Charlie teleports a single-qubit state to Alice and prepares a single-qubit state for Bob. The quantum channel is constructed by using Hadamard (H) and Controlled-NOT (CNOT) operations. Participants reconstruct the desired states by performing Bell-state measurements, single-qubit measurements, and unitary transformations. Compared with existing schemes, this new scheme improves the efficiency and capacity of quantum communication because it constructs a cyclic and bidirectional quantum communication and simultaneously supports two communication protocols, quantum teleportation and remote state preparation. Only single-qubit measurements, two-qubit measurements, and basic unitary transformations are utilized in the scheme, so our operation complexity is lower than others. Thus, the scheme is likely to be implemented through physical experiments in the future. Besides this, we discuss the impact of noisy environments (amplitude-damping, phase-damping noise, bit-flip noise, and phase-flip noise) in the scheme and calculate the fidelities of the output states. It is demonstrated that the fidelities only depend on the coefficients of the initial state and the decoherence rate.

Asymmetric Controlled Bidirectional Remote Preparation of Single- and Three-Qubit Equatorial State in Noisy Environment

We present an asymmetric controlled bidirectional remote preparation scheme under the control of Charlie, where Alice transmits an arbitrary single-qubit equatorial state to Bob and Bob transmits an arbitrary three-qubit equatorial state to Alice. First, the quantum channel is constructed by using <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Hadamard</i> ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${H}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CNOT</i> operations. Second, we consider our scheme in the noiseless environment and construct the appropriate measurement bases. In addition, the participants can recover the prepared states through implementing the corresponding recovery operations determinately. Third, we discuss our scheme in five types of noisy environments (amplitude-damping, phase-damping, bit-flip, phase-flip, and depolarizing noisy environment). The fidelities of the output states are calculated, which depend on the coefficients of the prepared states and the decoherence rates. Finally, some discussions and conclusions are given. Compared with previous schemes, our scheme does not need additional operations or auxiliary qubits. So it is slightly more efficient.

Rotational Alignment Decay and Decoherence of Molecular Superrotors.

We present the quantum master equation describing the coherent and incoherent dynamics of a rapidly rotating molecule in the presence of a thermal background gas. The master equation relates the rate of rotational alignment decay and decoherence to the microscopic scattering amplitudes, which we calculate for anisotropic van der Waals scattering. For large rotational energies, we find quantitative agreement of the resulting alignment decay rate with recent superrotor experiments.

Decoherence dynamics of qubits coupled to systems at quantum transitions

We study the decoherence properties of a two-level (qubit) system homogeneously coupled to an environmental many-body system at a quantum transition, considering both continuous and first-order quantum transitions. In particular, we consider a $d$-dimensional quantum Ising model as environment system. We study the dynamic of the qubit decoherence along the global quantum evolution starting from pure states of the qubit and the ground state of the environment system. This issue is discussed within dynamic finite-size scaling frameworks. We analyze the dynamic finite-size scaling of appropriate qubit-decoherence functions. At continuous quantum transitions, they develop power laws of the size of the environment system, with a substantial enhancement of the growth rate of the qubit decoherence with respect to the case in which the environment system is in normal noncritical conditions. The enhancement of the qubit decoherence growth rate appears much larger at first-order quantum transitions, leading to exponential laws when increasing the size of the environment system.

Dissipation and thermal noise in hybrid quantum systems in the ultrastrong-coupling regime

The interaction among the components of a hybrid quantum system is often neglected when considering the coupling of these components to an environment. However, if the interaction strength is large, this approximation leads to unphysical predictions, as has been shown for cavity-QED and optomechanical systems in the ultrastrong-coupling regime. To deal with these cases, master equations with dissipators retaining the interaction between these components have been derived for the quantum Rabi model and for the standard optomechanical Hamiltonian. In this article, we go beyond these previous derivations and present a general master equation approach for arbitrary hybrid quantum systems interacting with thermal reservoirs. Specifically, our approach can be applied to describe the dynamics of open hybrid systems with harmonic, quasi-harmonic, and anharmonic transitions. We apply our approach to study the influence of temperature on multiphoton vacuum Rabi oscillations in circuit QED. We also analyze the influence of temperature on the conversion of mechanical energy into photon pairs in an optomechanical system, which has been recently described at zero temperature. We compare our results with previous approaches, finding that these sometimes overestimate decoherence rates and understimate excited-state populations.

Non-Markovian dynamics of the electronic subsystem in a laser-driven molecule: Characterization and connections with electronic-vibrational entanglement and electronic coherence

Non-Markovian quantum evolution of the electronic subsystem in a laser-driven molecule is characterized through the appearance of negative decoherence rates in the canonical form of the electronic master equation. For a driven molecular system described in a bipartite Hilbert space $\mathcal{H}={\mathcal{H}}_{el}⨂{\mathcal{H}}_{\mathrm{vib}}$ of dimension $2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{N}_{v}$, we derive the canonical form of the electronic master equation, deducing the canonical measures of non-Markovianity and the Bloch volume of accessible states. We find that one of the decoherence rates is always negative, accounting for the inherent non-Markovian character of the electronic evolution in the vibrational environment. Enhanced non-Markovian behavior, characterized by two negative decoherence rates, appears if there is a coupling between the electronic states $g,\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}e$, such that the evolution of the electronic populations obeys $d({P}_{g}{P}_{e})/dt&gt;0$. Non-Markovianity of the electronic evolution is analyzed in relation to temporal behaviors of the electronic-vibrational entanglement and electronic coherence, showing that enhanced non-Markovian behavior accompanies entanglement increase. Taking as an example the coupling of two electronic states by a laser pulse in the ${\mathrm{Cs}}_{2}$ molecule, we analyze non-Markovian dynamics under laser pulses of various strengths, finding that the weaker pulse stimulates the bigger amount of non-Markovianity. Our results show that increase of the electronic-vibrational entanglement over a time interval is correlated to the growth of the total amount of non-Markovianity calculated over the same interval using canonical measures and connected with the increase of the Bloch volume. After the pulse, non-Markovian behavior is correlated to electronic coherence, such that vibrational motion in the electronic potentials which diminishes the nuclear overlap, implicitly increasing the linear entropy of entanglement, brings a memory character to dynamics.

Non-Markovian dephasing and depolarizing channels

We introduce a method to construct non-Markovian variants of completely positive (CP) dynamical maps, particularly, qubit Pauli channels. We identify non-Markovianity with the breakdown in CP-divisibility of the map, i.e., appearance of a not-completely-positive (NCP) intermediate map. In particular, we consider the case of non-Markovian dephasing in detail. The eigenvalues of the Choi matrix of the intermediate map crossover at a point which corresponds to a singularity in the canonical decoherence rate of the corresponding master equation, and thus to a momentary non-invertibility of the map. Thereafter, the rate becomes negative, indicating non-Markovianity. We quantify the non-Markovianity by two methods, one based on CP-divisibility (Hall et al., PRA 89, 042120, 2014), which doesn't require optimization but requires normalization to handle the singularity, and another method, based on distinguishability (Breuer et al. PRL 103, 210401, 2009), which requires optimization but is insensitive to the singularity.

Coherent dynamics of a qubit–oscillator system in a noisy environment

We investigate the non-Markovian dynamics of a qubit–oscillator system embedded in a noisy environment by employing the hierarchical equations of motion approach. It is shown that the decoherence rate of the whole qubit–oscillator–bath system can be significantly suppressed by enhancing the coupling strength between the qubit and the harmonic oscillator. Moreover, we find that the non-Markovian memory character of the bath is able to facilitate a robust quantum coherent dynamics in this qubit–oscillator–bath system. Our findings may be used to engineer some tunable coherent manipulations in mesoscopic quantum circuits.

Quantum Simulation with a Trilinear Hamiltonian

Interaction among harmonic oscillators described by a trilinear Hamiltonian ℏξ(a^{†}bc+ab^{†}c^{†}) is one of the most fundamental models in quantum optics. By employing the anharmonicity of the Coulomb potential in a linear trapped three-ion crystal, we experimentally implement it among three normal modes of motion in the strong-coupling regime, where the coupling strength is much larger than the decoherence rate of the ion motion. We use it to simulate the interaction of an atom and light as described by the Tavis-Cummings model and the process of nondegenerate parametric down-conversion in the regime of a depleted pump.

Long-lived quantum coherences in a V -type system strongly driven by a thermal environment

We explore the coherent dynamics of a three-level $\mathsf{V}$-type system interacting with a thermal bath in the regime where thermal excitation occurs much faster than spontaneous decay. We present analytic solutions of the Bloch-Redfield quantum master equations, which show that strong incoherent pumping can generate long-lived quantum coherences among the excited states of the $\mathsf{V}$-type system in the overdamped regime defined by the condition $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}/(\overline{n}\ensuremath{\gamma})&lt;f(p)$, where $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$ is the excited-state level splitting, $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ is the spontaneous decay rate, $\overline{n}\ensuremath{\gg}1$ is the effective photon occupation number proportional to the pumping intensity, and $f(p)$ is a universal function of the transition dipole alignment parameter $p$. In the limit of nearly parallel transition dipoles ($p\ensuremath{\rightarrow}1$) the coherence lifetime ${\ensuremath{\tau}}_{c}=1.34(\overline{n}/\ensuremath{\gamma}){(\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}/\ensuremath{\gamma})}^{\ensuremath{-}2}$ scales linearly with $\overline{n}$ and is enhanced by the factor $0.67\overline{n}$ with respect to the weak-pumping limit [Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 113601 (2014); J. Chem. Phys. 144, 244108 (2016)]. We also establish the existence of long-lived quasistationary states, which occur in the overdamped regime and affect the process of thermalization of the $\mathsf{V}$-type system with the bath, slowing down the approach to thermal equilibrium. In the case of nonparallel transition dipole moments ($p&lt;1$), no quasistationary states are formed and the coherence lifetime decreases sharply. The sharp transition between the different regimes of coherent dynamics is due to an interplay between coherence-generating Fano interference and various coherence-destroying processes (such as stimulated decay). Using a newly developed effective decoherence rate model, we find that in the limit $p\ensuremath{\rightarrow}1$ the rates of coherence generation and decay are almost exactly balanced and the effective decoherence rate is minimized, leading to long coherence lifetimes. Our results reveal new regimes of long-lived quantum coherent dynamics, which could be observed in thermally driven atomic and molecular systems.

Entanglement in a fermionic spin chain containing a single mobile boson under decoherence

The concurrence between first and the last sites of a fermionic spin chain containing a single boson is rigorously investigated at finite low temperature in the vicinity of a weak homogeneous magnetic field. We consider the boson as a mobile spin-1 particle through the chain and study concurrence without/under decoherence and express some interesting phase flip and bit flip reactions of the pairwise entanglement between first and the last half-spins in the chain. Our investigations show that the concurrence between two considered half-spins has different behavior for various positions of the single boson along the chain. Indeed, we realize that the single boson mobility has an essential role to probe the pairwise entanglement intensity between two spins located at the opposite ends of a fermionic chain. Interestingly, the entanglement remains alive for higher temperatures when the boson is the nearest neighbor of the first fermion. When the boson is at the middle of chain, it is demonstrated that the threshold temperature (at which the concurrence vanishes) versus decoherence rate can be considered as a threshold temperature boundary. These results pave the way to set and interpret the numerical and analytical expressions for utilizing quantum information in realistic scenarios such as quantum state transmission, quantum communication science and quantum information processing, where the both fermion-fermion and fermion-boson correlations should be taken in to account.

Coherent spin-photon coupling using a resonant exchange qubit.

Electron spins hold great promise for quantum computation because of their long coherence times. Long-distance coherent coupling of spins is a crucial step towards quantum information processing with spin qubits. One approach to realizing interactions between distant spin qubits is to use photons as carriers of quantum information. Here we demonstrate strong coupling between single microwave photons in a niobium titanium nitride high-impedance resonator and a three-electron spin qubit (also known as a resonant exchange qubit) in a gallium arsenide device consisting of three quantum dots. We observe the vacuum Rabi mode splitting of the resonance of the resonator, which is a signature of strong coupling; specifically, we observe a coherent coupling strength of about 31 megahertz and a qubit decoherence rate of about 20 megahertz. We can tune the decoherence electrostatically to obtain a minimal decoherence rate of around 10 megahertz for a coupling strength of around 23 megahertz. We directly measure the dependence of the qubit-photon coupling strength on the tunable electric dipole moment of the qubit using the 'AC Stark' effect. Our demonstration of strong qubit-photon coupling for a three-electron spin qubit is an important step towards coherent long-distance coupling of spin qubits.

Entropy Squeezing of a Qubit Interdicting with Two-Mode Kerr Nonlinear Coupler Due to Intrinsic Damping

An analytical description for the dynamical evolution of a qubit interacting with two nonlinear Kerr oscillators pumped by optical parametric process is derived through Su(1, 1)-algebraic treatment. The role of intrinsic damping, detuning and Kerr-like Medium on the squeezing phenomenon is elucidated via information entropy squeezing. The evolutions of the interaction of the qubit with two-mode Kerr nonlinear coupler lead to the appearance the regular squeezing phenomenon during the chosen time-interval. The preserving and protecting of the qubit components from the squeezing can be controlled by the intrinsic decoherence, detuning and the Kerr-like medium effects. Where the squeezing phenomenon deteriorates with increasing the decoherence rate, whereas, the Kerr-like medium can not protect some qubit components from the squeezing.

Theory of nonlinear microwave absorption by interacting two-level systems

The microwave absorption and noise caused by quantum two-level systems (TLS) dramatically suppress the coherence in Josephson junction qubits that are promising candidates for a quantum information applications. Microwave absorption by TLSs is not clearly understood yet because of the complexity of their interactions leading to the spectral diffusion. Here, the theory of the non-linear absorption in the presence of spectral diffusion is developed using the generalized master equation formalism. The theory predicts that the linear absorption regime holds while a TLS Rabi frequency is smaller than their phase decoherence rate. At higher external fields, a novel non-linear absorption regime is found with the loss tangent inversely proportional to the intensity of the field. The theory can be generalized to acoustic absorption and lower dimensions realized in superconducting qubits.

Analyzing the spectral density of a perturbed analog quantum simulator using the Keldysh formalism

Simulation of interacting electron systems is one of the great challenges of modern quantum chemistry and solid state physics. Controllable quantum systems offer the opportunity to create artificial structures which mimic the system of interest. An interesting quantity to extract from these quantum simulations is the spectral function. We map a noisy quantum simulator onto a fermionic system and investigate the influence of decoherence on the simulation of the spectral density using a diagrammatic approach on Keldysh contour. We show that features stronger than the single-qubit decoherence rate can be resolved, while weaker features wash out. For small systems, we compare our Keldysh approach to master-equation calculations.