Decoherence in atom–field interactions: A treatment using superoperator techniques

Abstract Decoherence is a subject of great importance in quantum mechanics, particularly in the fields of quantum optics, quantum information processing and quantum computing. Quantum computation relies heavily in the unitary character of each step carried out by a quantum computational device and this unitarity is affected by decoherence. An extensive study of master equations is therefore needed for a better understanding on how quantum information is processed when a system interacts with its environment. Master equations are usually studied by using Fokker–Planck and Langevin equations and not much attention has been given to the use of superoperator techniques. In this report we study in detail several approaches that lead to decoherence, for instance a variation of the Schrodinger equation that models decoherence as the system evolves through intrinsic mechanisms beyond conventional quantum mechanics rather than dissipative interaction with an environment. For the study of the dissipative interaction we use a correspondence principle approach. We solve the master equations for different physical systems, namely, Kerr and parametric down conversion. In the case of light-matter interaction we show that although dissipation destroys the quantumness of the field, information of the initial field may be obtained via the reconstruction of quasiprobability distribution functions.