Quasiparticles of decoherence processes in open quantum many-body systems: Incoherentons

Abstract

The relaxation dynamics of an open quantum system is determined by the competition between the coherent Hamiltonian dynamics of a system and the dissipative dynamics due to interactions with environments. It is therefore of fundamental interest to understand the transition from the coherent to incoherent regimes. We find that hitherto unrecognized quasiparticles—incoherentons—describe this coherent-to-incoherent transition in eigenmodes of a Liouvillian superoperator that governs the dynamics of an open quantum many-body system. Here, an incoherenton is defined as an interchain bound state in an auxiliary ladder system that represents the density matrix of a system. The Liouvillian eigenmodes are classified into groups with different decay rates that reflect the number of incoherentons involved therein. We also introduce a spectral gap—quantum coherence gap—that separates the different groups of eigenmodes. We demonstrate the existence of incoherentons in a lattice boson model subject to dephasing, and show that the quantum coherence gap closes when incoherentons are deconfined, which signals a dynamical transition from incoherent relaxation with exponential decay to coherent oscillatory relaxation. Furthermore, we discuss how the decoherence dynamics of quantum many-body systems can be understood in terms of the generation, localization, and diffusion of incoherentons.