Unitary death of Schr\"odinger's cat
Abstract
We analyze dynamics of the Rabi model describing interactions of a qubit with a single soft-mode oscillator. We show that the model with a slightly violated parity generates symmetric Schr\"odinger cat states of the oscillator, which suddenly perish in a spontaneous unitary process similar to the measurement-induced wave-function collapse. The effect is sufficiently robust to be tested experimentally, e.g., with trapped ions, macroscopic mechanical oscillators or superconducting circuits.
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