Quantum Decoherence of Phonons in Bose-Einstein Condensates

TL;DR

This paper investigates the quantum decoherence of phonons in Bose-Einstein Condensates using quantum optics techniques, revealing that decoherence may not significantly hinder the development of phonon-based quantum technologies.

Contribution

It is the first study to analyze quantum decoherence of phonons in BECs, applying modern quantum optics methods to assess their viability in quantum information applications.

Findings

Quantum decoherence of phonons in BECs is limited.

Decoherence does not heavily constrain phonon-based quantum devices.

Potential for BEC phonons in quantum communication is promising.

Abstract

We apply modern techniques from quantum optics and quantum information science to Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs) in order to study, for the first time, the quantum decoherence of phonons of isolated BECs. In the last few years, major advances in the manipulation and control of phonons have highlighted their potential as carriers of quantum information in quantum technologies, particularly in quantum processing and quantum communication. Although most of these studies have focused on trapped ion and crystalline systems, another promising system that has remained relatively unexplored is BECs. The potential benefits in using this system have been emphasized recently with proposals of relativistic quantum devices that exploit quantum states of phonons in BECs to achieve, in principle, superior performance over standard non-relativistic devices. Quantum decoherence is often the limiting factor in the practical realization of quantum technologies, but here we show that quantum decoherence of phonons is not expected to heavily constrain the performance of these proposed relativistic quantum devices.