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The quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects with strong system-environment coupling

To date, studies of the quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects focus on quantum systems that are weakly interacting with their environment. In this paper, we investigate what happens to a quantum system under the action of repeated measurements if the quantum system is strongly interacting with its envi...

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Autor principal: Chaudhry, Adam Zaman
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5431853/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28496109
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-01844-8
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author Chaudhry, Adam Zaman
author_facet Chaudhry, Adam Zaman
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description To date, studies of the quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects focus on quantum systems that are weakly interacting with their environment. In this paper, we investigate what happens to a quantum system under the action of repeated measurements if the quantum system is strongly interacting with its environment. We consider as the quantum system a single two-level system coupled strongly to a collection of harmonic oscillators. A so-called polaron transformation is then used to make the problem in the strong system-environment coupling regime tractable. We find that the strong coupling case exhibits quantitative and qualitative differences as compared with the weak coupling case. In particular, the effective decay rate does not depend linearly on the spectral density of the environment. This then means that, in the strong coupling regime that we investigate, increasing the system-environment coupling strength can actually decrease the effective decay rate. We also consider a collection of two-level atoms coupled strongly with a common environment. In this case, we find that there are further differences between the weak and strong coupling cases since the two-level atoms can now indirectly interact with one another due to the common environment.
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spelling pubmed-54318532017-05-16 The quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects with strong system-environment coupling Chaudhry, Adam Zaman Sci Rep Article To date, studies of the quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects focus on quantum systems that are weakly interacting with their environment. In this paper, we investigate what happens to a quantum system under the action of repeated measurements if the quantum system is strongly interacting with its environment. We consider as the quantum system a single two-level system coupled strongly to a collection of harmonic oscillators. A so-called polaron transformation is then used to make the problem in the strong system-environment coupling regime tractable. We find that the strong coupling case exhibits quantitative and qualitative differences as compared with the weak coupling case. In particular, the effective decay rate does not depend linearly on the spectral density of the environment. This then means that, in the strong coupling regime that we investigate, increasing the system-environment coupling strength can actually decrease the effective decay rate. We also consider a collection of two-level atoms coupled strongly with a common environment. In this case, we find that there are further differences between the weak and strong coupling cases since the two-level atoms can now indirectly interact with one another due to the common environment. Nature Publishing Group UK 2017-05-11 /pmc/articles/PMC5431853/ /pubmed/28496109 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-01844-8 Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Chaudhry, Adam Zaman
The quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects with strong system-environment coupling
title The quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects with strong system-environment coupling
title_full The quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects with strong system-environment coupling
title_fullStr The quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects with strong system-environment coupling
title_full_unstemmed The quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects with strong system-environment coupling
title_short The quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno effects with strong system-environment coupling
title_sort quantum zeno and anti-zeno effects with strong system-environment coupling
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5431853/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28496109
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-01844-8
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