Decoherence of a qubit as a diffusion on the Bloch sphere

Abstract

We analyze qubit decoherence in the framework of geometric quantum mechanics. In this framework the qubit density operators are represented by probability distributions which are also the K\"ahler functions on the Bloch sphere. Interestingly, the complete positivity of the quantum evolution is recovered as ellipticity of the second order differential operator (deformed Laplacian) which governs the evolution of the probability distribution.