Finite-Memory Extension of Tegmark's Decoherence Bound in Biological Media

Abstract

Tegmark's decoherence bound is derived under the assumption of a strictly memoryless environment. We show that this result corresponds to the singular limit of a finite-memory theory. For exponentially correlated environments decoherence is generically quadratic at short times and the decoherence time scales as the square root of the bath correlation time. For the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck bath we derive the exact non-Markovian coherence equation and verify the predicted scaling using an exact pseudomode mapping. Tegmark's bound is recovered only in the vanishing-memory limit.