# Topological Protection of Coherence in a Dissipative Environment

Abstract : One dimensional topological insulators are characterized by edge states with exponentially small energies. According to one generalization of topological phase to non-Hermitian systems, a finite system in a non-trivial topological phase displays surface states with exponentially long life times. In this work we explore the possibility of exploiting such non-Hermitian topological phases to enhance the quantum coherence of a fiducial qubit embedded in a dissipative environment. We first show that a network of qubits interacting with lossy cavities can be represented, in a suitable super-one-particle sector, by a non-Hermitian " Hamiltonian " of the desired form. We then study, both analytically and numerically, one-dimensional geometries with up to three sites per unit cell, and up to a topological winding number $W$ = 2. For finite-size systems the number of edge modes is a complicated function of $W$ and the system size $N$. However we find that there are precisely $W$ modes localized at one end of the chain. In such topological phases the quibt's coherence lifetime is exponentially large in the system size. We verify that, for $W$ > 1, at large times, the Lindbladian evolution is approximately a non-trivial unitary. For $W$ = 2 this results in Rabi-like oscillations of the qubit's coherence measure.
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Cited literature [19 references]

https://hal-cea.archives-ouvertes.fr/cea-01540332
Contributor : Emmanuelle de Laborderie <>
Submitted on : Friday, June 16, 2017 - 11:24:10 AM
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1703.03075.pdf
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### Identifiers

• HAL Id : cea-01540332, version 1
• ARXIV : 1703.03075

### Citation

Lorenzo Campos Venuti, Zhengzhi Ma, Hubert Saleur, Stephan Haas. Topological Protection of Coherence in a Dissipative Environment. 2017. ⟨cea-01540332⟩

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