Decoherence of many-body systems due to many-body interactions

We study a spin-gas model, where N_S system qubits are interacting with N_B bath qubits via many-body interactions. We consider multipartite Ising interactions and show how the effect of decoherence depends on the specific coupling between the system and its environment. For instance, we analyze the influence of decoherence induced by k-body interactions for different values of k. Moreover, we study how the effect of decoherence depends on the correlation between bath qubits that are coupled to different individual system qubits and compare Markovian with non-Markovian scenarios. We derive a useful canonical form of a completely positive map that describes a class of system environment interactions with a finite size of environment correlations. As examples we consider specific quantum many-body states and investigate their evolution under different decoherence models. As a complementary investigation, we study how the coupling to the environment can be employed to generate a desired multipartite state.