Decoherence from universal tomographic measurements

Abstract: The decoherence phenomenon arising from an environmental monitoring of the state of a quantum system, as opposed to monitoring of a preferred observable, is worked out in detail using two equivalent formulations, namely, repeated applications of universal tomographic measurements using positive operator-valued measures, and its continuous time unravelling from the Lindblad equation. The effect of decoherence is analysed by studying the evolution of Stratonovich-Weyl quasiprobability distributions on the state-space of the system. It is shown that decoherence makes an arbitrary-given quasiprobability distribution manifestly positive, thus modelling the emergence of classicality in some sense. The decoherence timescale, the minimum time that quasiprobability distributions of every initial state of the system become nonnegative, is shown to decrease in Hilbert-space dimension, and hence larger quantum systems decohere faster.