QUASI-HAMILTONIAN METHOD FOR COMPUTATION OF DECOHERENCE RATES

We present a general formalism for the dissipative dynamics of an arbitrary quantum system in the presence of a classical stochastic process. It is applicable to a wide range of physical situations, and in particular it can be used for qubit arrays in the presence of classical two-level systems (TLS). In this formalism, all decoherence rates appear as eigenvalues of an evolution matrix. Thus the method is linear, and the close analogy to Hamiltonian systems opens up a toolbox of well-developed methods such as perturbation theory and mean-field theory. We apply the method to the problem of a single qubit in the presence of TLS that give rise to pure dephasing 1/f noise and solve this problem exactly.