The thermal decoherence of harmonic oscillators is investigated here.The quantum system presented here is a one-dimensional oscillator with angular frequency,which is surrounded by a thermal bath of environmental oscillators.There are various environmental oscillators with different angular frequency(below an ultraviolet cutoff).At the beginning,the quantum system is a pure state and the environmental oscillators are in thermodynamic equilibrium with temperature.After a period,the system-environment interactions inspire significant decoherence of the quantum state.Such decoherence is displayed by explicit calculations of the purity and von Neumann entropy of the quantum system.It is worth noting that the decoherence could be significant even in the weak coupling and low temperature case due to the large amount of environmental degrees of freedom.Since the decoherence process is inspired between the quantum system and an ordinary thermal environment here,the thermal decoherence result is quite general.
LI JianZHOU Gao-LiangYAN Zheng-XinLIU WeiWANG Zhao-Qi
