Decoherence of a multiparticle system in vacuum
Wei Guo · Physical Review A · 2007
In this work, decoherence of a system from an entangled state is studied theoretically by computing the time-dependent probability amplitude with which the system remains in that state. The system is composed of, in addition to vacuum, identical two-level atoms that interact indirectly with each other through photons and have a uniform distribution in the vacuum. Under the assumption that in the initial entangled state only one atom is allowed to be in the excited state, a general expression for the probability amplitude is obtained and applied to two specific entangled states, one symmetric and one antisymmetric, to demonstrate that the system decoheres from these two states at the same rate under certain conditions.