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Thursday, December 02, 2010
12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
Theoretical Division Conference Room, TA-3, Building 123, Room 121.

Quantum Lunch

Decoherence Rate and System-Environment Quantum Correlations

Cesar Rodriguez-Rosario
Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University

We show how quantum correlations to the environment provide bounds to the time rate of purity change, which in turn can be used to estimate dissipation rates for general non-Markovian open quantum systems. To achieve this, we find the set of all system-environment states that are the sufficient and necessary for the time derivative of the purity of the system to be zero under any system-environment interaction. We name them lazy states, and show that they are a generalization of states with only classical correlations as measured by quantum discord to projective measurements of any rank. The concept of lazy states permits the construction of a protocol for detecting global quantum correlations using only local dynamical information. The mathematical structure of lazy states provides insight into the pervasive nature of decoherence.

Host: Wojciech H. Zurek, whz@lanl.gov, 7-6837