Suppression of decoherence by periodic forcing (Q2511550)

In this work the authors investigate the phenomenon of decoherence in finite dimensional quantum systems, in terms of what happens when a time-periodic external force acting on an open system is superimposed to a noise coupling. By letting \(T\) denote the period of the forcing and \(\lambda\) the system-environment coupling strength (both small), it is shown that for times up to order \((\lambda T)^{-1}\), (from the text), ``the dynamics is given by \[ [\rho_s(t)]_{i,j}=e^{i\Phi_{i,j}(t)}[\rho_s(0)]_{i,j}+\mathcal{O}(\lambda+T) \] where \(\Phi_{i,j}(t)\) is a real phase. The off-diagonal density matrix elements do not decay, so forcing has counteracted to the decoherence effect of the reservoir''. The main result of the work, Theorem 1.1, shows that if \(\lambda\) and \(T\) are small enough then the system dynamics is close to the one generated by the system hamiltonian plus the forcing term, but without the interaction with the heat bath.