Spatial decoherence factor via the qubit-field interaction

Abstract

We analyze the time evolution of an initial spatial coherence for a two level atom whose internal degrees of freedom interact with a single mode of a cavity field. When the qubit-field subsystem is taken as an environment, the translational dynamics experiences a decoherence process which may be encoded in a decoherence factor D. We find that the field statistics affects D through the alternative paths the system-environment may follow along their entanglement, while eventual field phase properties give rise to an imaginary part of D which is related to the atomic translation. From the decoherence perspective, we analyze the relation between the atomic momentum and the imaginary part of the atomic spatial density matrix, and some considerations on its asymptotic behavior are brought into question at the conclusion of the paper.

title changed, minor revisions, references added

References in corpus (5)

• Irreversible decay of nonlocal entanglement via a reservoir of a single degree of freedom
• Quantum erasure within the Optical Stern-Gerlach Model
• The non dissipative damping of the Rabi oscillations as a "which-path" information
• On the observability of Bell's inequality violation in the optical Stern-Gerlach model
• Translational dynamics effects on the non-local correlations between two atoms