We challenge the wide-spread belief that interactions of a quantum system with its environment necessarily diminish quantum effects and thereby restrict the progress in the fields of quantum science and technology. Our main goal is to establish open systems as systems that are in fact supplemented by a quantum environment, rather than being impaired through the environment, shining a new light on an untapped resource for quantum applications and their physical implementations. By considering the full quantum nature of interaction between systems and their environments, we target three main objectives: noise-activated quantum correlations, environment-assisted quantum algorithms, and multiplatform noise characterization.
We study the sources of decoherence in solid-state qubits in order to then use decoherence constructively. A qubit interacting with a non-trivial, large, interacting system can be used to measure the properties of the large system, as long as the nature of the decoherence is well understood. It can also be used to probe entanglement that builds up between the two systems during their joint evolution.
We aim to devise protocols for quantum computing platforms that (re-)activate quantum correlations due to the presence of and interaction with an environment. To name one application, a self-purifying quantum communication (teleportation), powered by a quantum environment, has been proposed. We study ways to counter decoherence by taking advantage of the quantum nature of the noise sources and to facilitate reliable quantum information processing in the presence of noise.
