Distribution of interference in the presence of decoherence

We study the statistics of quantum interference for completely positive maps. We calculate analytically the mean interference and its second moment for finite-dimensional quantum systems interacting with a simple environment consisting of one or several spins (qudits). The joint propagation of the entire system is taken as unitary with an evolution operator drawn from the circular unitary ensemble (CUE). We show that the mean interference decays with a power law as function of the dimension of the Hilbert space of the environment, with a power that depends on the temperature of the environment. ©2009 The American Physical Society