Quantum Institute: Visitor Schedule

The Quantum Lunch is regularly held on Thursdays in the Theoretical Division Conference Room, TA-3, Building 123, Room 121.
For more information, contact Diego Dalvit.
To add your name to the Quantum Lunch email list, contact Ellie Vigil

Thursday, December 2, 2010
12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Speaker: Cesar Rodriguez-Rosario (Harvard University)

Technical Host: Wojciech Zurek

TOPIC: Decoherence Rate and System-Environment Quantum Correlations

Abstract
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.