  The current stage of quantum computing technology, called noisy
intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) technology, is characterized by large errors
that prohibit it from being used for real applications. In these devices,
decoherence, one of the main sources of error, is generally modeled by
Markovian master equations such as the Lindblad master equation. In this work,
the decoherence phenomena are addressed from the perspective of the
steepest-entropy-ascent quantum thermodynamics (SEAQT) framework in which the
noise is in part seen as internal to the system. The framework is as well used
to describe changes in the energy associated with environmental interactions.
Three scenarios, an inversion recovery experiment, a Ramsey experiment, and a
two-qubit entanglement-disentanglement experiment, are used to demonstrate the
applicability of this framework, which provides good results relative to the
experiments and the Lindblad equation, It does so, however, from a different
perspective as to the cause of the decoherence. These experiments are conducted
on the IBM superconductive quantum device ibmq_bogota.
