Regensburg 2004 – scientific programme

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DY: Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 50: Entanglement and Decoherence

DY 50.2: Talk

Friday, March 12, 2004, 10:45–11:00, H2

Probing the decoherence of an oscillator with light — •Carsten Henkel¹, Mathias Nest², Peter Domokos³, and Ron Folman⁴ — ¹Institut für Physik, Universität Potsdam, Germany — ²Institut für Chemie, Universität Potsdam, Germany — ³Institute for Solid State Physics and Optics, Budapest, Hungary — ⁴Physics Department, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel

The decoherence of an oscillating particle due to the coupling to its environment can be modelled in the framework of quantum Brownian motion. From the average motion of the particle, some of the relevant parameters (damping rate, equilibrium distribution) can be extracted, but many details of the environmental bath remain arbitrary. We suggest that experiments using an optical interferometer can obtain more detailed information [1,2,3]. We show that the optical signal can differentiate between master equations for different models for the environmental coupling [4]. The scaling with particle mass and possible enhancements using an optical cavity are discussed.

[1] S. Bose et al., Phys. Rev. A 56 (1997) 4175

[2] S. Mancini et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 88 (2002) 120401

[3] W. Marshall et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 91 (2003) 130401

[4] quant-ph/0310160