Anomalous Decay and Decoherence in Atomic Gases

TL;DR

This paper investigates how pair collisions in atomic gases cause unusual decay and decoherence behaviors, revealing non-linear dynamics with distinctive signatures like power-law decay and anomalous state evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a mean-field Lindbladian model capturing non-linear decay and decoherence phenomena in atomic gases, highlighting new signatures of non-linear quantum dynamics.

Findings

Power law decay and dephasing rates observed

Dephasing rates depend on initial conditions

Bloch ball flows anomalously towards a hemisphere

Abstract

Pair collisions in atomic gases lead to decoherence and decay. Assuming that all the atoms in the gas are equally likely to collide one is led to consider Lindbladian of mean field type where the evolution in the limit of many atoms reduces to a single qudit Lindbladian with quadratic non-linearity. We describe three smoking guns for non-linear evolutions: Power law decay and dephasing rates; Dephasing rates that take a continuous range of values depending on the initial data and finally, anomalous flow of the Bloch ball towards a hemisphere.