Gossiping electrons : Strong decoherence from screening

Sammanfattning

In a strongly correlated material the localized electrons, typically the electrons in the 3d-orbitals, become entangled with each other through the Coulomb interaction. However, these electrons also interact with more mobile (itinerant) electrons in the s- and p-orbitals. The latter process called screening as it effectively reduces the strength of the interaction between the 3d-electrons. A less studied and often neglected effect of the screening is that it also entangles the 3d-electrons with the itinerant electrons, which is equivalent to a leakage of quantum information from the 3delectrons to the environment. This process leads to decoherence since it causes the 3d-electrons to effectively lose some of their quantum mechanical properties. But what does this mean for our understanding of strongly correlated materials and can this decoherence effect be of such magnitude that neglecting it may qualitatively affect the calculated material properties? This is the question this report tries to answer, but for a minimal impurity model consisting of an atom and a few surrounding bath orbitals.