Stuttgart 2012 – scientific programme

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 67: Quanteneffekte: Verschränkung und Dekohärenz 2

Q 67.1: Talk

Friday, March 16, 2012, 14:00–14:15, V7.01

(contribution withdrawn) Decoherence and the Nature of System-Environment Correlations — •Ansgar Pernice and Walter T. Strunz — Institut für Theoretische Physik, Technische Universität Dresden, D-01062 Dresden, Germany

We investigate system-environment correlations based on the exact dynamics of a qubit and its environment in the framework of pure decoherence (phase damping). We focus on the relation of decoherence and the build-up of system-reservoir entanglement for an arbitrary (possibly mixed) initial qubit state. In the commonly employed regime where the qubit dynamics can be described by a Markov master equation of Lindblad type, we find that for almost all qubit initial states inside the Bloch sphere, decoherence is complete while the total state is still separable - no entanglement is involved. In general, both "separable" and "entangling" decoherence occurs, depending on temperature and initial qubit state. Moreover, we find situations where classical and quantum correlations periodically alternate as a function of time in the regime of low temperatures.