ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how the nonclassical states are peculiarly sensitive to dissipation when the coupling of the field modes to their larger environment is taken into account. Well before the field energy is significantly dissipated, the coherences responsible for the nonclassical behaviour will decay, at a ‘decoherence rate’ determined by the square of the separation of the constituent components of the nonclassical superpositions in phase-space. The Wigner functions for each Fock state component are given by Laguerre polynomials. These interfere to generate the superposition of interest. Coherences are destroyed at a rate which is proportional to the degree of excitation of the system as the system relaxes to a statistical mixture of relevant ‘pointer bases’. The chapter shows how the dissipative environment ‘deconstructs’ the field into its appropriate constituent parts. The chapter examines the Jaynes-Cummings system governed by the Milburn equation and shows how the intrinsic decoherence modifies the time evolution of the atomic inversion.
