  The use of rotational degrees of freedom of quantum systems in quantum
technologies is limited by environmental effects under decoherence mechanism.
Here, we study the mechanism of decoherence based on a new formalism of elastic
scattering for a nonspherical quantum system prepared in a superposition of
rotational degrees of freedom. We show that for a dielectric ellipsoid immersed
in an environment composed of thermal photons the rotational decoherence rate
depends on the angular differences between the two configurations of the system
and the seventh power of the temperature which is different from the
translational one. Then we analyze the effect of different values of angular
momentum quantum numbers of the environmental spherical harmonics on the
rotational decoherence rate.
