4 research outputs found
Geometric phase for an adiabatically evolving open quantum system
We derive an elegant solution for a two-level system evolving adiabatically
under the influence of a driving field with a time-dependent phase, which
includes open system effects such as dephasing and spontaneous emission. This
solution, which is obtained by working in the representation corresponding to
the eigenstates of the time-dependent Hermitian Hamiltonian, enables the
dynamic and geometric phases of the evolving density matrix to be separated and
relatively easily calculated.Comment: 10 pages, 0 figure
Collisional decoherence of a tracer particle moving in one dimension
We study decoherence of the external degree of freedom of a tracer particle moving in a one dimensional dilute Boltzmann gas. We find that phase averaging is the dominant decoherence effect, rather than information exchange between tracer and gas particles. While a coherent superposition of two wave packets with different mean positions quickly turns into a mixed state, it is demonstrated that such superpositions of different momenta are robust to phase averaging, until the two wave packets acquire a different position due to the different velocity of each wave packet.9 page(s