Unusual decoherence in qubit measurements with a Bose-Einstein condensate


Abstract in English

We consider an electrostatic qubit located near a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of noninteracting bosons in a double-well potential, which is used for qubit measurements. Tracing out the BEC variables we obtain a simple analytical expression for the qubits density-matrix. The qubits evolution exhibits a slow ($propto1/sqrt{t}$) damping of the qubits coherence term, which however turns to be a Gaussian one in the case of static qubit. This stays in contrast to the exponential damping produced by most classical detectors. The decoherence is, in general, incomplete and strongly depends on the initial state of the qubit.

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