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Aspects of decoherence in qubit systems

University of British Columbia

We present a theoretical discussion of various aspects of the dynamics of information in quantum systems of qubits. We begin by reviewing ideas about entanglement and information in systems of qubits, different models for realistic qubits coupled to an external environment, how this causes the loss of information stored in qubits, and some practical designs for qubits that have been created. Then we study how the state of many-body systems can be decomposed in terms of its different subsystems and derived a hierarchy of equations describing the motion of these different parts. We show that in a qubit system, the central objects in this hierarchy are correlators between different components of different qubits. Systems where the environment coupled to a central qubit is a "spin bath'' of environmental qubits are then considered in detail and we find that information lost by the central qubit is transferred via a cascade to higher and higher order correlations with the environment. We discuses this process in the realistic example of an "Fe₈'' magnetic molecule qubit. Finally we discuss simple models of the dynamics of many entangled qubits.

Text

2019-04-29

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/69984

Physics

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/