2008/09/30 by A. Vaglica, Alessandro Vaglica, G. Vetri
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Spectroscopy and Quantum Chemical Studies #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1140/epjd/e2009-00151-4
published as Eur.Phys.J D 54, 9-19 (2009) · title changed, minor revisions, references added
openalex publication_date 2009/05/19 · arxiv created 2009/07/13 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We analyze the time evolution of an initial spatial coherence for a two level atom whose internal degrees of freedom interact with a single mode of a cavity field. When the qubit-field subsystem is taken as an environment, the translational dynamics experiences a decoherence process which may be encoded in a decoherence factor D. We find that the field statistics affects D through the alternative paths the system-environment may follow along their entanglement, while eventual field phase properties give rise to an imaginary part of D which is related to the atomic translation. From the decoherence perspective, we analyze the relation between the atomic momentum and the imaginary part of the atomic spatial density matrix, and some considerations on its asymptotic behavior are brought into question at the conclusion of the paper.