A signature of quantumness in pure decoherence control

Abstract

We study a decoherence reduction scheme that involves an intermediate measurement on the qubit in an equal superposition basis, in the general framework of all qubit-environment interactions that lead to qubit pure decoherence. We show under what circumstances the scheme always leads to a gain of coherence on average, regardless of the time at which the measurement is performed, demonstrating its wide range of applicability. Furthermore, we find that observing an average loss of coherence is a highly quantum effect, resulting from non-commutation of different terms in the Hamiltonian. We show the diversity of behavior of coherence as effected by the application of the scheme, which is skewed towards gain rather than loss, on a variant of the spin-boson model that does not fulfill the commutation condition.