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arXiv:0807.4211 · Europhysics Letters (EPL)

A Monte Carlo method for modeling thermal damping: Beyond the Brownian motion master equation

Kurt A. Jacobs

Published Feb 1, 2009• 6 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The "standard" Brownian motion master equation, used to describe thermal damping, is not completely positive, and does not admit a Monte Carlo method, important in numerical simulations. To eliminate both these problems one must add a term that generates additional position diffusion. He we show that one can obtain a completely positive simple quantum Brownian motion, efficiently solvable, without any extra diffusion. This is achieved by using a stochastic Schrödinger equation (SSE), closely analogous to Langevin's equation, that has no equivalent Markovian master equation. Considering a specific example, we show that this SSE is sensitive to nonlinearities in situations in which the master equation is not, and may therefore be a better model of damping for nonlinear systems.

DOI
10.1209/0295-5075/85/40002

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The "standard" Brownian motion master equation, used to describe thermal damping, is not completely positive, and does not admit a Monte Carlo method, important in numerical simulations. To eliminate both these problems one must add a term that generates additional position diffusion. He we show that one can obtain a completely positive simple quantum Brownian motion, efficiently solvable, without any extra diffusion. This is achieved by using a stochastic Schrödinger equation (SSE), closely analogous to Langevin's equation, that has no equivalent Markovian master equation. Considering a specific example, we show that this SSE is sensitive to nonlinearities in situations in which the master equation is not, and may therefore be a better model of damping for nonlinear systems.
The standard Brownian motion master equation, used to describe thermal damping, is not completely positive, and does not admit a Monte Carlo method, important in numerical simulations. To eliminate both these problems one must add a term that generates additional position diffusion. He we show that one can obtain a completely positive simple quantum Brownian motion, efficiently solvable, without any extra diffusion. This is achieved by using a stochastic Schroedinger equation (SSE), closely analogous to Langevin's equation, that has no equivalent Markovian master equation. Considering a specific example, we show that this SSE is sensitive to nonlinearities in situations in which the master equation is not, and may therefore be a better model of damping for nonlinear systems.
We give a new description of quantum Brownian motion in terms of stochastic pure states. The corresponding path integral propagator allows us to establish a direct connection to the classical Langevin equation, in the Schrodinger picture. We show that in the quantum domain, one is naturally led to consider two stochastic processes driving the Brownian dynamics, one of them representing thermal fluctuations, as in the classical case. The second process reflects growing entanglement between the Brownian particle and its environment, and is therefore a truly quantum noise process. Technically, our result rests on the representation of the full propagator of the Brownian particle and its environment in a coherent state basis. For open system dynamics that may be described by a master equation, such stochastic schemes have already been proven to be efficient Monte Carlo methods. Here, we give a new stochastic scheme that covers low temperatures and strong friction, the latter limit being the case Einstein originally investigated.
Stochastic Schr\"odinger equations for quantum trajectories offer an alternative and sometimes superior approach to the study of open quantum system dynamics. Here we show that recently established convolutionless non-Markovian stochastic Schr\"odinger equations may serve as a powerful tool for the derivation of convolutionless master equations for non-Markovian open quantum systems. The most interesting example is quantum Brownian motion (QBM) of a harmonic oscillator coupled to a heat bath of oscillators, one of the most employed exactly soluble models of open system dynamics. We show explicitly how to establish the direct connection between the exact convolutionless master equation of QBM and the corresponding convolutionless exact stochastic Schr\"odinger equation.
Starting from the Caldeira-Leggett model, we derive the equation describing the quantum Brownian motion, which has been originally proposed by Dekker purely from phenomenological basis containing extra anomalous diffusion terms. This nonperturbative approach yields explicit analytical expressions for the temperature dependence of the diffusion constants. At high temperatures, additional momentum diffusion terms are suppressed and classical Langevin equation can be recovered and at the same time positivity of the density matrix is satisfied. At low temperatures, the diffusion constants have a finite positive value. However, below a certain critical temperature, the master equation does not satisfy the positivity condition as proposed by Dekker.
Non-Markovian master equations describe general open quantum systems when no approximation is made. We provide the exact closed master equation for the class of Gaussian, completely positive, trace preserving, non-Markovian dynamics. This very general result allows us to investigate a vast variety of physical systems. We show that the master equation for non-Markovian quantum Brownian motion is a particular case of our general result. Furthermore, we derive the master equation unraveled by a non-Markovian, dissipative stochastic Schrödinger equation, paving the way for the analysis of dissipative non-Markovian collapse models.
We analyze the microscopic model of quantum Brownian motion, describing a Brownian particle interacting with a bosonic bath through a coupling which is linear in the creation and annihilation operators of the bath, but may be a nonlinear function of the position of the particle. Physically, this corresponds to a configuration in which damping and diffusion are spatially inhomogeneous. We derive systematically the quantum master equation for the Brownian particle in the Born-Markov approximation and we discuss the appearance of additional terms, for various polynomials forms of the coupling. We discuss the cases of linear and quadratic coupling in great detail and we derive, using Wigner function techniques, the stationary solutions of the master equation for a Brownian particle in a harmonic trapping potential. We predict quite generally Gaussian stationary states, and we compute the aspect ratio and the spread of the distributions. In particular, we find that these solutions may be squeezed (superlocalized) with respect to the position of the Brownian particle. We analyze various restrictions to the validity of our theory posed by non-Markovian effects and by the Heisenberg principle. We further study the dynamical stability of the system, by applying a Gaussian approximation to the time-dependent Wigner function, and we compute the decoherence rates of coherent quantum superpositions in position space. Finally, we propose a possible experimental realization of the physics discussed here, by considering an impurity particle embedded in a degenerate quantum gas.