Decoherence and the Nature of System-Environment Correlations
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1109.0147,
title = {Decoherence and the Nature of System-Environment Correlations},
author = {A. Pernice and W. T. Strunz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1109.0147},
year = {2013}
}