Locality of physical noise in quantum rigid rotors

Molecular rotational state spaces, modeled by infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces of quantum rigid rotors, present new grounds for encoding qubits with reliable error correction. They are, however, prone to noise induced by the environment via rotational friction and diffusion. As a step towards making qubits realizable through these rotor space configurations, we study the nature of noise introduced by a thermal environment in these systems. For the simpler setting of a planar rotor, we confirm that physical errors are local in the rotor's angular position and momentum phase space. Our analysis can be extended to the more general case of the completely asymmetric rigid rotor whose basis states are described by elements of the non-abelian group SO(3).