Preferred States of Decoherence under Intermediate System-Environment Coupling

TL;DR

This paper investigates how preferred states of decoherence, or pointer states, emerge in a two-level quantum system across different coupling regimes, including intermediate coupling, enhancing understanding of decoherence processes.

Contribution

It demonstrates that approximate pointer states can emerge at intermediate coupling without thermal averaging, and these states smoothly transition to known limits for weak or strong coupling.

Findings

Approximate pointer states emerge at intermediate coupling.

Pointer states deform continuously between weak and strong coupling limits.

Qualitative explanations of computational results are provided.

Abstract

The notion that decoherence rapidly reduces a superposition state to an incoherent mixture implicitly adopts a special representation, namely, the representation of preferred (pointer) states (PS). For weak or strong system-environment coupling, PS is known to be the energy eigenstates of the system Hamiltonian or the eigenstates of the system-environment interaction Hamiltonian. Via a simple dynamical model that simulates a two-level system interacting with few other degrees of freedom as its environment, it is shown that even for intermediate system-environment coupling, approximate PS may still emerge from the coherent quantum dynamics of the whole system in the absence of any thermal averaging. The found PS can also continuously deform to expected limits for weak or strong system-environment coupling. Computational results are also qualitatively explained. The findings should be useful towards further understandings of decoherence and quantum thermalization processes.