Long-Time Coherence in Echo Spectroscopy with $\pi/2$--$\pi$--$\pi/2$ Pulse Sequence

TL;DR

This paper studies a fidelity function in quantum systems that reveals long-time coherence properties and decoherence strength, using a specific pulse sequence inspired by atom optics experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a new fidelity measure based on time-reversal operations and analyzes its decay and saturation behavior over time.

Findings

Short-time decay of fidelity is quartic in time.

Fidelity saturates above ergodic value at long times.

Long-time saturation provides information on decoherence strength.

Abstract

Motivated by atom optics experiments, we investigate a new class of fidelity functions describing the reconstruction of quantum states by time-reversal operations as $M_{\mathrm{Da}}(t) = | <\psi | e^{i H_2 t / 2} e^{i H_1 t / 2} e^{-i H_2 t / 2} e^{-i H_1 t / 2} | \psi >|^2$. We show that the decay of $M_{\mathrm{Da}}$ is quartic in time at short times, and that it freezes well above the ergodic value at long times, when $H_2-H_1$ is not too large. The long-time saturation value of $M_{\mathrm{Da}}$ contains easily extractable information on the strength of decoherence in these systems.