Abstract We consider a quantum Brownian particle interacting with two harmonic baths, which is then perturbed by a cubic coupling linking the particle and the baths. This cubic coupling induces non-linear dissipation and noise terms in the influence functional/master equation of the particle. Its effect on the Out-of-Time-Ordered Correlators (OTOCs) of the particle cannot be captured by the conventional Feynman-Vernon formalism.We derive the generalised influence functional which correctly encodes the physics of OTO fluctuations, response, dissipation and decoherence. We examine an example where Markovian approximation is valid for the OTO dynamics. If the original cubic coupling has a definite time-reversal parity, the leading order OTO influence functional is completely determined by the couplings in the usual master equation via OTO generalisation of Onsager-Casimir relations. New OTO fluctuationdissipation relations connect the non-Gaussianity of the thermal noise to the thermal jitter in the damping constant of the Brownian particle.
We present a perturbative derivation of the generalized Langevin equation starting from a relativistic quantum field theory at finite temperature. Considering a complex scalar field coupled to a thermal mediator, we use a collective field formulation (Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation) to decouple the non-linear density constraint associated with a localized composite degree of freedom. By performing a saddle-point expansion and explicitly integrating out the collective fluctuations, we obtain the dynamic response kernel for the macroscopic center-of-mass coordinate. We show that localizing the density spontaneously breaks translational invariance, naturally generating a harmonic restoring force that results in an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. Furthermore, we resolve the vanishing friction paradox of the free-field limit by employing a resummed Dyson-Schwinger approach. We explicitly demonstrate that the thermal width of the dressed propagator generates finite Ohmic dissipation via Landau damping of the Källén-Lehmann spectral functions. This work provides a transparent, effective field theory bridge between microscopic thermal quantum fields and macroscopic open quantum systems.
We describe general features of thermal correlation functions in quantum systems, with specific focus on the fluctuation-dissipation type relations implied by the KMS condition. These end up relating correlation functions with different time ordering and thus should naturally be viewed in the larger context of out-of-time-ordered (OTO) observables. In particular, eschewing the standard formulation of KMS relations where thermal periodicity is combined with time-reversal to stay within the purview of Schwinger-Keldysh functional integrals, we show that there is a natural way to phrase them directly in terms of OTO correlators. We use these observations to construct a natural causal basis for thermal n-point functions in terms of fully nested commutators. We provide several general results which can be inferred from cyclic orbits of permutations, and exemplify the abstract results using a quantum oscillator as an explicit example.
Building upon the work of Hu, Paz, and Zhang [1,2] on open quantum systems we consider the quantum Brownian motion (QBM) model with one oscillator (position variable
x) as the system, {\it nonlinearly} coupled to an environment of
N harmonic oscillators (with mass
mn, natural frequency
ωn, position
qn and momentum
pn variables) in the form
∑n(vn1(x)qnk+vn2(x)pnl) where
k,l are integers (the present work only considers the
k=l=2 cases). The vertex functions $v_{n1}, v_{n2} $ are of the form
vn1=λCn1f(x),vn2(x)=−λCn2mn−2ωn−2f(x) where
Cn1,2 are the coupling constants with the
nth oscillator,
f(x) is any arbitrary function of
x, and
λ is a dimensionless constant. Employing the closed-time-path formalism the influence action
SIF is calculated using a perturbative expansion in
λ. It is possible to identify the terms in
SIF quadratic or higher in
Δ(s)≡f(x+(s))−f(x−(s)) to constitute the noise kernel, while terms linear in
Δ to that of the dissipation kernel. The non-Gaussian noise kernel gives rise to non-zero three-point correlation function of the corresponding stochastic force. The pathway presented here should be useful for the exploration of \textit{non-Gaussian properties of systems nonlinearly coupled with their environments}; examples in early universe cosmology and in quantum optomechanics (QOM) are mentioned. A modified fluctuation-dissipation relation (FDR) is also established, which ensures the consistency of the model and the accuracy of results even at higher perturbative orders. Another result of significance is the derivation of a nonlinear Langevin equation which is expected to be useful for many open quantum system applications.
We construct a quantum Schwinger-Keldysh (SK) effective field theory for the diffusive hydrodynamics of a conserved scalar field. Quantum corrections within the SK framework are guided by fluctuation-dissipation relations, enforced via a dynamical Kubo-Martin-Schwinger (KMS) symmetry. We find that the KMS symmetry necessarily generates fluctuation contributions in the SK effective action at all orders in the noise field, thereby giving rise to intrinsically non-Gaussian noise. We use our results to compute one-loop quantum corrections to the two-point density-density retarded correlation function, leading to a quantum generalization of hydrodynamic long-time tails. Our results apply at arbitrarily high orders in
ℏ. The one-loop results for retarded correlation functions have been expressed in terms of a family of polynomials. We also provide a closed-form expression for the one-loop results at leading order in the wavevector expansion.