Decoherence due to Elastic Rayleigh Scattering

Decoherence due to elastic Rayleigh scattering.

We present theoretical and experimental studies of the decoherence of hyperfine ground-state superpositions due to elastic Rayleigh scattering of light off resonant with higher lying excited states. We demonstrate that under appropriate conditions, elastic Rayleigh scattering can be the dominant source of decoherence, contrary to previous discussions in the literature. We show that the elastic-...

Theory of decoherence due to scattering events and Lévy processes.

A general connection between the characteristic function of a Lévy process and loss of coherence of the statistical operator describing the center of mass degrees of freedom of a quantum system interacting through momentum transfer events with an environment is established. The relationship with microphysical models and recent experiments is considered, focusing on the recently observed transit...

Decoherence of quantum kinematical correlations: Elastic scattering of identical particles

Information Rate Loss due to Radiation Decoherence

The information rates achievable by using electromagnetic radiation affected by thermal noise and signal decoherence are studied. The standard coherent Gaussian model is compared with an alternative photon gas model which represents lack of a shared phase reference between transmitter and receiver. At any frequency, information rates over the photon gas model essentially coincide with those ove...

Spin decoherence due to fluctuating fields.

The dynamics of a spin in the presence of a deterministic and a fluctuating magnetic field is solved for analytically to obtain the averaged value of the spin as a function of time for various kinds of fluctuations (noise). Specifically, analytic results are obtained for the time dependence of the expectation value of the spin, averaged over fluctuations, for Gaussian white noise, Gaussian colo...