Model the environment's vacuum and one-photon states by . A unitary dilation of amplitude damping acts on the initially vacant environment as
These images are orthonormal. One unitary completion takes and fixes . Taking environment matrix elements gives .
Evolve by and take the partial trace over the environment. Orthogonality of the two environment records removes the cross-branch terms, giving . Entrywise,
Excited population is transferred to the ground state, while coherence is reduced by the square root of the survival probability.
Take an environment initially in its vacuum state , with recording an emitted photon. In atom-environment order, put and . A unitary dilation of amplitude damping is defined by
The middle two images are orthonormal, and they are orthogonal to the two fixed images. Thus this completion really is a unitary operator. For the occupied initial environmental subspace, it leaves a ground-state atom unchanged and splits an excited-state atom into no-emission and emission alternatives with probabilities and .
Tracing out the environment after this unitary evolution gives
The environment matrix elements are and , recovering the Kraus operators in part (a). More explicitly, the basis operators transform as
Applying linearity to the atomic density operator therefore yields
The lost excited population goes to the ground state, the trace stays one, and coherences decrease by . Discarding the distinguishable environmental photon record is precisely what turns the joint unitary evolution into a noisy atomic quantum channel.