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We study the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of ultracold bosons in a double- and triple-well potential within the Bose-Hubbard model by means of the semiclassical Herman-Kluk propagator and compare the results to the frequently applied "classical dynamics" calculation in terms of the truncated Wigner approximation (TWA). For the double-well system we find the semiclassical results in excellent agreement with the numerically exact ones, while the TWA is not able to reproduce any revivals of the wave function. The triple-well system turns out to be more difficult to handle due to the irregularity of the corresponding classical phase space. Here, deviations of the TWA from the exact dynamics appear even for short times, while better agreement is obtained using the semiclassical approach presented in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key lesson of the decoherence program is that information flowing out from an open system is stored in the quantum state of the surroundings. Simultaneously, quantum measurement theory shows that the evolution of any open system when its environment is measured is nonlinear and leads to pure states conditioned on the measurement record. Here we report the discovery of a fundamental relation between measurement and entanglement which is characteristic of this scenario. It takes the form of a scaling law between the amount of entanglement in the conditional state of the system and the probabilities of the experimental outcomes obtained from measuring the state of the environment, with the latter modeled as a bosonic field linearly coupled with the system. Using the scaling, we construct the distribution of entanglement over the ensemble of experimental outcomes for standard models with one open channel and provide rigorous results on finite-time disentanglement in systems coupled to non-Markovian baths. In principle, the scaling allows the direct experimental detection and quantification of entanglement in conditional states of a large class of open systems by quantum tomography of the bath even when it consists of a single mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the dynamics of ultracold bosons in a double-well potential within the two-mode Bose-Hubbard model by means of semiclassical methods. By applying a Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) quantization we find analytical results for the energy spectrum, which are in excellent agreement with numerically exact results. They are valid in the energy range of plasma oscillations, both in the Rabi and the Josephson regime. Adopting the reflection principle and the Poisson summation formula we derive an analytical expression for the dynamics of the population imbalance depending only on the few relevant parameters of the system. This allows us to discuss its characteristic dynamics, especially the oscillation frequency and the collapse and revival time, as a function of the model parameters, leading to a deeper understanding of Josephson physics. We find that our formulas match previous experimental observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the case of phase damping (pure decoherence) we investigate the extent to which environmental traits are imprinted on an open quantum system. The dynamics is described using the quantum channel approach. We study what the knowledge of the channel may reveal about the nature of its underlying dynamics and, conversely, what the dynamics tell us about how to consistently model the environment. We find that, for a Markov phase-damping channel(i.e., a channel compatible with a time-continuous Markovian evolution), the environment may adequately be represented by a mixture of only a few coherent states. For arbitrary Hilbert space dimension N⩾4 we refine the idea of quantum phase damping, for which we show a means of identification. Symmetry considerations are used to identify decoherence-free subspaces of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surprisingly often decoherence is due to classical fluctuations of ambient fields and may thus be described in terms of random unitary (RU) dynamics. However, there are decoherence channels where such a representation cannot exist. Based on a simple and intuitive geometric measure for the distance of an extremal channel to the convex set of RU channels we are able to characterize the set of true quantum phase-damping channels. Remarkably, using the Caley-Menger determinant, our measure may be assessed directly from the matrix representation of the channel. We find that the channel of maximum quantumness is closely related to a symmetric, informationally complete positive operator-valued measure on the environment. Our findings are in line with numerical results based on the entanglement of assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Open quantum system dynamics of random unitary type may in principle be fully undone. Closely following the scheme of environment-assisted error correction proposed by Gregoratti and Werner [J. Mod. Opt. 50, 915 (2003)]. we explicitly carry out all steps needed to invert a phase-damping error on a single qubit. Furthermore, we extend the scheme to a mixed-state environment. Surprisingly, we find cases for which the uncorrected state is closer to the desired state than any of the corrected ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the applicability of collisional models for non-Markovian dynamics of open quantum systems. By allowing interactions between the separate environmental degrees of freedom in between collisions we are able to construct a collision model that allows us to study quantum memory effects in open system dynamics. We also discuss the possibility to embed non-Markovian collision model dynamics into Markovian collision model dynamics in an extended state space. As a concrete example we show how, using the proposed class of collision models, we can discretely model non-Markovian amplitude damping of a qubit. In the time-continuous limit, we obtain the well-known results for spontaneous decay of a two-level system into a structured zero-temperature reservoir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A long-standing open problem in the non-Markovian quantum state diffusion (QSD) approach to open quantum systems is to establish the non-Markovian QSD equations for multiple-qubit systems. In this paper, we settle this important question by explicitly constructing a set of exact time-local QSD equations for N-qubit systems. Our exact time-local (convolutionless) QSD equations have paved the way towards simulating quantum dynamics of many-body open systems interacting with a common bosonic environment. The applicability of this multiple-qubit stochastic equation is exemplified by numerically solving several quantum open many-body systems concerning quantum coherence dynamics and dynamical control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]