2007/07/16 by Yuan, Shengjun, Katsnelson, Mikhail I., De Raedt, Hans
#FOS: Physical sciences #Other Condensed Matter (cond-mat.other) #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0707.2372
We study the decoherence of two coupled spins that interact with a chaotic spin-bath environment. It is shown that connectivity of spins in the bath is of crucial importance for the decoherence of the central system. The previously found phenomenon of two-step decoherence (Phys. Rev. Lett. \bf 90, 210401 (2003)) turns out to be typical for the bath with a slow enough dynamics or no dynamics. For a generic random system with chaotic dynamics a conventional exponential relaxation to the pointer states takes place. Our results confirm a conjecture of Paz and Zurek (Phys. Rev. Lett. \bf 82, 5181 (1999)) that for weak enough interactions the pointer states are eigenstates of the central system.