On way to describe "pure" decoherence (that is, decoherence with respect to a basis that doesn't involve transitions between basis states) between a system S and an environment E is with a unitary operator that acts conditional on the state of S: U=∑i|Si⟩⟨Si|⊗UEi. Here, UEi describes the evolution of E conditional on S being in state |Si⟩. A CP map on S constructed by applying U and tracing out E will leave fixed the diagonal matrix elements of the initial state ρS0 in the basis {|Si⟩}, but will in general add phases and decoherence (i.e. suppression of the norm) to off-diagonal elements. Importantly, U is a valid unitary for any choice of unitary UEi.
Now suppose I want to construct a unitary that acts like this on an overcomplete basis. I'll specialize to the coherent states |α⟩ where α=x+ip is a point in phase space, but the solution for a general basis would be interesting. If I write down U=∫dα|α⟩⟨α|⊗UEα. one can check that this is not a valid unitary for arbitrary UEα. (This can be easily seen when S has only two dimensions using an overcomplete basis of 3 or 4 vectors, and choosing random conditional unitaries.)
Is there a compact way to write down the requirements on the UEα for U to be unitary? Obviously one can expand U†U=I using the above definition, but I'm unable to transform this to something with a clear interpretation. My intuition is that UEα and UEβ should be "close" for |α−β|2≪1 since they ought to be unrestricted for |α−β|2≫1, but I can't formalize this in a useful way.
(Incidentally, this is closely related to my previous questions which did not generate much interest. I'm giving this one last shot.)
Edit: In the case where the unitary is taking the environment from a certain initial state |E0⟩ to a conditional state |Eα⟩, one can see that the associated CP map is well behaved (i.e. that ∑iK†iKi=I, where the Ki are the Kraus operators) iff the operator ∫dαdβ|α⟩⟨α|β⟩⟨β|⋅f(α,β) equal the identity, where f(α,β)=⟨Eα|Eβ⟩ is the Gram matrix of inner products of the (normalized) conditional states. A sufficient condition for this is that f(α,β) depends only on α−β but not α+β. I believe this is a necessary condition, but I am unable to prove it (or find a counter-example). This condition, along with the fact that f(α,β) is a Gram matrix, makes f(α−β) a positive-definite function, which I presume is important but don't know how to exploit it.
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