Dynamics of a qubit in a linear/nonlinear structured environment

The understanding of the main dephasing and relaxation mechanisms is crucial for the realization of efficient solid state qubits. In this contribution we focus on the case in which the qubit is coupled to a driven linear or non-linear oscillator which in turn interacts with a dissipative environment. This situation mimicks the case of flux qubits read-out by a DC-SQUID, the latter being a linear or non-linear oscillator, or a cooper-pair box in a resonant electromagnetic cavity. In our work we adopt the point of view that the oscillator is part of the environment itself. In the linear oscillator case, this amounts to consider a spin-boson problem with a structured spectral density. Generalizing to the case of a finite bias, we show that analytic solutions for the dynamics can be obtained, at arbitrary detuning and finite temperatures, in the case of large Q-factors of the oscillator. One, two or more dominating oscillation frequencies of the qubit can be observed as a consequence of the entanglement with the oscillator. In the nonlinear case we show, using a mapping procedure which is exact in the linear case, that the problem can be approximated to a spin-boson model whose spectral density is proportional to the imaginary part of the nonlinear susceptibility of a quantum Duffing oscillator