Unveiling environmental entanglement in strongly dissipative qubits

Bera, Soumya

Florens, Serge

Baranger, Harold

Roch, Nicolas

Nazir, Ahsan

Chin, Alex

2023-01-14T14:42:49Z

2023-01-14T14:42:49Z

2013-01-30

2023-01-14T14:42:48Z

The coupling of a qubit to a macroscopic reservoir plays a fundamental role in understanding the complex transition from the quantum to the classical world. Considering a harmonic environment, we use both intuitive arguments and numerical many-body quantum tomography to study the structure of the complete wavefunction arising in the strong-coupling regime, reached for intense qubit-environment interaction. The resulting strongly-correlated many-body ground state is built from quantum superpositions of adiabatic (polaron-like) and non-adiabatic (antipolaron-like) contributions from the bath of quantum oscillators. The emerging Schrödinger cat environmental wavefunctions can be described quantitatively via simple variational coherent states. In contrast to qubit-environment entanglement, we show that non-classicality and entanglement among the modes in the reservoir are crucial for the stabilization of qubit superpositions in regimes where standard theories predict an effectively classical spin.

https://hdl.handle.net/10161/26470

arXiv

arXiv

cond-mat.mes-hall

cond-mat.mes-hall

cond-mat.str-el

quant-ph

Unveiling environmental entanglement in strongly dissipative qubits

Journal article

Baranger, Harold|0000-0002-1458-2756

1301.7430

1301.7430

Duke

Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

Physics

Published online