VISIBILITY FRINGE REDUCTION DUE TO NOISE-INDUCED EFFECTS: MICROSCOPIC APPROACH TO INTERFERENCE EXPERIMENTS

PAULA I. VILLAR AND FERNANDO C. LOMBARDO

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MODERN PHYSICS B

World Scientific

Lugar: Singapure; Año: 2007 vol. 21 p. 4659 - 4676

0217-9792

Decoherence is the main process behind the quantum to classical transition. It is a purelyquantum mechanical effect by which the system loses its ability to exhibit coherentbehavior. The recent experimental observation of diffraction and interference patternsfor large molecules raises some interesting questions. In this context, we identify possibleagents of decoherence to take into account when modeling these experiments, and studytheir visible (or not) effects on the interference pattern. We thereby present an analysisof matter wave interferometry in the presence of a dynamic quantum environment, andstudy how much the visibility fringe is reduced and in which timescale the decoherenceeffects destroy the interference of massive objects. Finally, we apply our results to theexperimental data reported on fullerenes and cold neutrons.