Importance of bath dynamics for decoherence in spin systems

Abstract

We study the decoherence of two coupled spins that interact with a chaotic spin-bath environment. It is shown that connectivity of spins in the bath is of crucial importance for the decoherence of the central system. The previously found phenomenon of two-step decoherence (Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 90}, 210401 (2003)) turns out to be typical for the bath with a slow enough dynamics or no dynamics. For a generic random system with chaotic dynamics a conventional exponential relaxation to the pointer states takes place. Our results confirm a conjecture of Paz and Zurek (Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 82}, 5181 (1999)) that for weak enough interactions the pointer states are eigenstates of the central system.