We consider a free charged particle interacting with an electromagnetic bath at zero temperature. The dipole approximation is used to treat the bath wavelengths larger than the width of the particle wave packet. The effect of these wavelengths is described then by a linear Hamiltonian whose form is analogous to phenomenological Hamiltonians previously adopted to describe the free particle-bath interaction. We study how the time dependence of decoherence evolution is related with initial particle-bath correlations. We show that decoherence is related to the time dependent dressing of the particle. Moreover because decoherence induced by the T=0 bath is very rapid, we make some considerations on the conditions under which interference may be experimentally observed.
We address the time evolution of the quantum correlations ($QCs$) such as entanglement, purity, and coherence for a model of two non-interacting qubits initially prepared as a maximally entangled bipartite state. We contrast the comparative potential of the classical fields to preserve these $QCs$ in the noisy and noiseless realms. We also disclose the characteristic dynamical behavior of the $QCs$ of the two-qubit state under the static noisy effects originating from the common and different configuration models. We show that there is a direct connection between the fluctuations allowed by an environment and the $QCs$ preservation. Due to the static noisy dephasing effects, the $QCs$ are suppressed, resulting in the separability of the two-qubit entangled state after a finite duration. Here, the $QCs$ decay effects are found much smaller in the common configuration model than that of the opponent. Furthermore, this protection of the $QCs$ under static noise for large intervals is entirely attributable to the existence of the entanglement sudden death and birth phenomenon. Most importantly, we found the bipartite $QCs$ less fragile than the tripartite ones in comparison under the static noise. In the case of the measures, the concurrence is found to be sharper for showing the entanglement sudden death and birth revivals in comparison to the purity and decoherence.
We present a model of an N-qubit channel where consecutive qubits experience correlated random rotations. Our model is an extension to the standard decoherence-free subsystems approach (DFS) which assumes that all the qubits experience the same disturbance. The variation of rotations acting on consecutive qubits is modeled as diffusion on the SU(2) group. The model may be applied to spins traveling in a varying magnetic field, or to photons passing through a fiber whose birefringence fluctuates over the time separation between photons. We derive an explicit formula describing the action of the channel on an arbitrary N-qubit state. For N=3 we investigate the effects of diffusion on both classical and quantum capacity of the channel. We observe that nonorthogonal states are necessary to achieve the optimal classical capacity. Furthermore we find the threshold for the diffusion parameter above which coherent information of the channel vanishes.
Fluctuation theorems allow one to make generalised statements about the behaviour of thermodynamic quantities in systems that are driven far from thermal equilibrium. In this article we apply Crooks fluctuation theorem to understand the entropy production of a continuously measured, zero-temperature quantum system; namely an optical cavity measured via homodyne detection. Our analysis shows that the entropy production can be well defined at zero temperature by considering entropy in the measurement record. We link this result to the Cramer-Rao inequality and show that the product of the Fisher information in the work distribution with the entropy production is bounded below by the square of the inverse energy fluctuations. This inequality indicates that there is a minimal amount of entropy production that is paid to acquire information about the work done to a quantum system driven far from equilibrium.
We show that spin systems with infinite-range interactions can violate at thermal equilibrium a multipartite Bell inequality, up to a finite critical temperature $T_c$. Our framework can be applied to a wide class of spin systems and Bell inequalities, to study whether nonlocality occurs naturally in quantum many-body systems close to the ground state. Moreover, we also show that the low-energy spectrum of the Bell operator associated to such systems can be well approximated by the one of a quantum harmonic oscillator, and that spin-squeezed states are optimal in displaying Bell correlations for such Bell inequalities.
We present a thorough investigation of the phenomena of frozen and time-invariant quantum discord for two-qubit systems independently interacting with local reservoirs. Our work takes into account several significant effects present in decoherence models, which have not been yet explored in the context of time-invariant quantum discord, but which in fact must be typically considered in almost all realistic models. Firstly, we study the combined influence of dephasing, dissipation and heating reservoirs at finite temperature. Contrarily to previous claims in the literature, we show the existence of time-invariant discord at high temperature limit in the weak coupling regime, and also examine the effect of thermal photons on the dynamical behaviour of frozen discord. Secondly, we explore the consequences of having initial correlations between the dephasing reservoirs. We demonstrate in detail how the time-invariant discord is modified depending on the relevant system parameters such as the strength of the initial amount of entanglement between the reservoirs.