2013/01/30 by Soumya Bera, Bera, Soumya, Serge Florens +11 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #FOS: Physical sciences #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Spectroscopy and Quantum Chemical Studies #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.str-el #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1301.7430
7+7 pages, 5+5 figures
arxiv created 2013/01/30 · openalex publication_date 2013/01/30 · arxiv updated 2013/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.