Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters
Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters
5 years ago

Quantifying Early Time Quantum Decoherence Dynamics through Fluctuations

Quantifying Early Time Quantum Decoherence Dynamics through Fluctuations
Ignacio Franco, Bing Gu
We introduce a general but simple relation between the timescale for quantum coherence loss and the initial fluctuations of operators that couple a quantum system with a surrounding bath. The relation allows the prediction and measurement of early time decoherence dynamics for any open quantum system, through purity, without reconstructing the system’s many-body density matrix. It is applied to predict the decoherence time for basic models—the Holstein chain, spin-boson and Caldeira-Legget models—commonly employed to capture electronic, vibrational, and vibronic dynamics in molecules. Such development also offers a practical platform to test the ability of approximate quantum dynamics methods to capture decoherence. In particular, a class of mixed quantum-classical schemes for molecular dynamics where the bath is treated classically, such as Ehrenfest dynamics, are shown to correctly capture short-time decoherence when the initial conditions are sampled from the Wigner distribution. These advances provide a useful platform to develop decoherence times for molecular processes and to test approximate molecular dynamics methods.

Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpclett.7b01817

DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.7b01817

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.