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We consider an open quantum system described by the GKLS equation and we are interested in the onset of decoherence. We are in particulary interested in situations where only some degrees of freedom of the system are coupled to the environment, and we want to understand if, and how fast, the noise travels through the system and eventually affects all degrees of freedom. We find that this can be understood in terms of the H\"ormander condition, a condition on the commutators of the Hamiltonian vectorfields of the Lindblad operators and the internal Hamiltonian, which is a condition for hypoellipticity known from the theory of PDE's. We show that for Gaussian quantum channels this condition leads to a delay in the onset of decoherence and can as well be used to detect decoherence free subsystems., Comment: 9 pages

Gaussian quantum channels are well understood and have many applications, e.g., in Quantum Information Theory and in Quantum Optics. For more general quantum channels one can in general use semiclassical approximations or perturbation theory, but it is not easy to judge the accuracy of such methods. We study a relatively simple model case, where the quantum channel is generated by a Lindblad equation where one of the Lindblad operators is a multiple of the internal Hamiltonian, and therefore the channel is not Gaussian. For this model we can compute the characteristic function of the action of the channel on a Gaussian state explicitly and we can as well derive a representation of the propagator in an integral form. This allows us to compare the exact results with semiclassical approximations and perturbation theory and evaluate their accuracy. We finally apply these results to the study of the evolution of the von Neumann entropy of a state., Comment: 31 pages, 6 figures

The dynamics of Gaussian states for open quantum systems described by Lindblad equations can be solved analytically for systems with quadratic Hamiltonians and linear Lindbladians, showing the familiar phenomena of dissipation and decoherence. It is well known that the Lindblad dynamics can be expressed as an ensemble average over stochastic pure-state dynamics, which can be interpreted as individual experimental implementations, where the form of the stochastic dynamics depends on the measurement setup. Here we consider quantum-jump and stochastic Schr\"odinger dynamics for initially Gaussian states. While both unravellings converge to the same Lindblad dynamics when averaged, the individual dynamics can differ qualitatively. For the stochastic Schr\"odinger equation, Gaussian states remain Gaussian during the evolution, with stochastic differential equations governing the evolution of the phase-space centre and a deterministic evolution of the covariance matrix. In contrast to this, individual pure-state dynamics arising from the quantum-jump evolution do not remain Gaussian in general. Applying results developed in the non-Hermitian context for Hagedorn wavepackets, we formulate a method to generate quantum-jump trajectories that is described entirely in terms of the evolution of an underlying Gaussian state. To illustrate the behaviours of the different unravellings in comparison to the Lindblad dynamics, we consider two examples in detail, which can be largely treated analytically, a harmonic oscillator subject to position measurement and a damped harmonic oscillator. In both cases, we highlight the differences as well as the similarities of the stochastic Schr\"odinger and the quantum-jump dynamics., Comment: 34 pages, 10 figures, Revised version with added author Roman Schubert, accepted to Journal of Physics A

We consider the propagation of Gaussian beams in a waveguide with gain and loss in the paraxial approximation governed by the Schr\"odinger equation. We derive equations of motion for the beam in the semiclassical limit that are valid when the waveguide profile is locally well approximated by quadratic functions. For Hermitian systems, without any loss or gain, these dynamics are given by Hamilton's equations for the center of the beam and its conjugate momentum. Adding gain and/or loss to the waveguide introduces a non-Hermitian component, causing the width of the Gaussian beam to play an important role in its propagation. Here we show how the width affects the motion of the beam and how this may be used to filter Gaussian beams located at the same initial position based on their width.

We investigate the time evolution of Hagedorn wavepackets by non-Hermitian quadratic Hamiltonians. We state a direct connection between coherent states and Lagrangian frames. For the time evolution a multivariate polynomial recursion is derived that describes the activation of lower lying excited states, a phenomenon unprecedented for Hermitian propagation. Finally we apply the propagation of excited states to the Davies--Swanson oscillator., Comment: 34 pages, 1 figure