Rotational decoherence due to thermal photon scattering

TL;DR

This paper investigates how thermal photon scattering causes rotational decoherence in nonspherical quantum systems, revealing a temperature-dependent rate that differs from translational decoherence and depends on angular configurations.

Contribution

It introduces a new formalism for elastic scattering in rotational decoherence and analyzes how environmental angular momentum affects decoherence rates.

Findings

Rotational decoherence rate depends on angular differences and temperature to the seventh power.

Decoherence rate varies with environmental angular momentum quantum numbers.

Rotational decoherence differs fundamentally from translational decoherence.

Abstract

The use of rotational degrees of freedom of quantum systems in quantum technologies is limited by environmental effects under decoherence mechanism. Here, we study the mechanism of decoherence based on a new formalism of elastic scattering for a nonspherical quantum system prepared in a superposition of rotational degrees of freedom. We show that for a dielectric ellipsoid immersed in an environment composed of thermal photons the rotational decoherence rate depends on the angular differences between the two configurations of the system and the seventh power of the temperature which is different from the translational one. Then we analyze the effect of different values of angular momentum quantum numbers of the environmental spherical harmonics on the rotational decoherence rate.