Influence of a Mesoscopic Bath on Quantum Coherence.pdfVIP

Influence of a Mesoscopic Bath on Quantum Coherence Onuttom Narayan1 and Harsh Mathur2 1 Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064 4 2 Physics Department, Case Western Reserve University, 0 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland OH 44106-7079 0 2 For a quantum double well system interacting with a mesoscopic bath, it is shown that a single p particle in the bath is sufficient to substantially reduce tunneling between the two wells. This is e demonstrated by considering an ammonia molecule in the center of a ring; in addition to halving the S maser line frequency, there is an increase in intensity by four orders of magnitude. The tunneling varies non-monotonically with the number N of electrons in the ring, reflecting the changing elec- 3 tronic correlations. Although the tunneling is reduced for small N , it turns around and grows to its 2 free value for large N. This is shown to not violate Anderson’s orthogonality theorem. Experimental ] implementations are discussed. l l a h The importance of decoherence for the transition between the two configurations for the ammonia dipole s- from quantum to classical behavior is well known. Var- is reduced by as much as 50%, reducing the frequency e ious authors have shown that when a system is coupled of the transition between the symmetric and antisym- m to a bath consisting of an infinite number of degrees of metric configurations by the same amount. In addi- t. freedom, irreversibility—and therefore, decoherence— tion, the coupling to the electron