Pulse control of sudden transition for two qubits in XY spin baths and quantum phase transition

Da-Wei Luo, Hai-Qing Lin, Jing-Bo Xu, Dao-Xin Yao

Published 2011-11-03Version 1

We study the dynamics of two initially correlated qubits coupled to their own separate spin baths modeled by a XY spin chain and find the explicit expression of the quantum discord for the system. A sudden transition is found to exist between classical and quantum decoherence by choosing certain initial states. We show that the sudden transition happens near the critical point, which provides a new way to characterize the quantum phase transition. Furthermore, we propose a scheme to prolong the transition time of the quantum discord by applying the bang-bang pulses.