Geometric phases in open systems: an exact model to study how they are corrected by decoherence

Abstract

We calculate the geometric phase for an open system (spin-boson model) which interacts with an environment (ohmic or nonohmic) at arbitrary temperature. However there have been many assumptions about the time scale at which the geometric phase can be measured, there has been no reported observation yet for mixed states under nonunitary evolution. We study not only how they are corrected by the presence of the different type of environments but also estimate the corresponding times at which decoherence becomes effective. These estimations should be taken into account when planning experimental setups to study the geometric phase in the nonunitary regime, particularly important for the application of fault-tolerant quantum computation.