Decoherence in a nonequilibrium environment

Abstract

We consider a quantum harmonic oscillator coupled to a general nonequilibrium environment. We show that the decoherence factor can be expressed in terms of a measurable effective temperature, defined via a generalized fluctuation-dissipation relation. We further propose a simple experimental scheme to determine the time-dependent effective temperature in a linear Paul trap with engineered reservoirs. Our formalism allows quantitative description of nonequilibrium decoherence in the presence of an arbitrary number of non-Markovian noise sources in a unified manner.