Engineered noisy environment for studying decoherence

Abstract

The largest obstacle to perform quantum information processing is decoherence of a system. In order to overcome this, various techniques, such as dynamical decoupling and quantum Zeno effects, have been proposed and demonstrated. Here, we present an NMR model with which various decoherence suppression techniques can experimentally be evaluated. By changing the conditions in the sample preparation, we can engineer an environment to interact the system that contains the information. Moreover, we can efficiently describe the dynamics by the operator-sum representation due to the simplicity of our model. As concrete examples, we have investigated the performance of dynamical decoupling with several molecules. Our model provides a useful test bench to understand the mechanism of decoherence induced by a noisy environment and to examine various ideas of decoherence suppression techniques.