Noisy propagation of Gaussian states in optical media with finite bandwidth

Abstract

We address propagation and entanglement of Gaussian states in optical media characterised by non-trivial spectral densities. In particular, we consider environments with a finite bandwidth and show that in the low temperature regime: i) secular terms in the master equation may be neglected; ii) attenuation (damping) is strongly suppressed; iii) the overall diffusion process may be described as a Gaussian noise channel with variance depending only on the bandwidth. We find several regimes where propagation is not much detrimental and entanglement may be protected form decoherence.