Decoherence Induced by Spin Chain Environment

We study the decoherence process of an exact solvable model that consists of a central spin-1/2 coupling to the surrounding anisotropy spin-1/2 chain in transverse fields. The Loschmidt echo is calculated to study the character of decoherence with different degree of anisotropy. Our results show that the degree of anisotropy γ greatly affects the decoherence process of the central spin-system when the spin chain is in weak transverse fields, but it gives weak effect in the strong transverse field. The decoherence process of the central system changed dramatically along the line of the critical points, and this may be explained as the reflection of quantum phase transitions.