Friedemann Queisser

Distance dependence of entanglement generation via a bosonic heat bath.

Within a generalized Caldeira-Leggett model, we analyze the conditions under which a bosonic heat bath can entangle two microscopic quantum systems at a distance r. We find that the attainable entanglement is extremely distance-sensitive. Significant entanglement can only be achieved if the systems are within a microscopic distance that is of order of the cutoff wavelength lambda of the system-bath interaction. At larger distances, the maximal entanglement is exponentially suppressed with a decay length of order lambda. We conclude that entanglement generation via a heat bath is not suitable for entangling remote objects.

Cosmological constant from decoherence

We address the issue why a cosmological constant (dark energy) possesses a small positive value instead of being zero. Motivated by the cosmic landscape picture, we mimic the dark energy by a scalar field with potential wells and show that other degrees of freedom interacting with it can localize this field by decoherence in one of the wells. Dark energy can then acquire a small positive value. We also show that the additional degrees of freedom enhance the tunneling rate between the wells. The consideration is performed in detail for the case of two wells and then extended to a large number of wells.

Sauter-Schwinger-like tunneling in tilted Bose-Hubbard lattices in the Mott phase

We study the Mott phase of the Bose-Hubbard model on a tilted lattice. On the (Gutzwiller) mean-field level, the tilt has no effect -- but quantum fluctuations entail particle-hole pair creation via tunneling. For small potential gradients (long-wavelength limit), we derive a quantitative analogy to the Sauter-Schwinger effect, i.e., electron-positron pair creation out of the vacuum by an electric field. For large tilts, we obtain resonant tunneling related to Bloch oscillations.

Environmental gravitational decoherence and a tensor noise model

We discuss decrease of coherence in a massive system due to the emission of gravitational waves. In particular we investigate environmental gravitational decoherence in the context of an interference experiment. The time-evolution of the reduced density matrix is solved analytically using the path-integral formalism. Furthermore, we study the impact of a tensor noise onto the coherence properties of massive systems. We discuss that a particular choice of tensor noise shows similarities to a mechanism proposed by Diosiand Penrose.