The prospect of controlling entanglement in interacting quantum systems offers a myriad of technological and scientific promises, given the progress in experimental studies in systems such as ultracold trapped gases. This control is often challenging because of decoherence, the process by which environmental interactions create spurious entanglements that can destroy the desired entanglement. Considering the collisional decoherence that is relevant for quantum measurements utilizing scattering in one-dimensional trapped gases, here we derive a relationship between particle masses and wave-packet widths that minimizes the entanglement created during scattering. We assess the relevance of our results by directly observing this relationship in the emergent scales of a master equation for a particle undergoing nonthermal scattering. Our relationship is independent of the details of the particle interactions and sheds light on how to design scattering processes that minimize decoherence.

• Received 30 May 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.99.012316