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arXiv:2607.29485

On the Emergence of Exponential Decay from Discrete Spectra for Friedrichs Hamiltonians

Tamim Al-Qaiwani, Sören Petrat

math-phquant-phSubmitted Jul 31, 2026• Announced Aug 3, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

We study a class of Friedrichs Hamiltonians, that is, operators describing an excited state coupled to a bath through a rank-one perturbation, in the case where the bath Hamiltonian has purely discrete spectrum. We consider sequences of such Hamiltonians for which the spectral measures associated to the coupling functions by the bath Hamiltonians converge weakly to a limiting measure that is absolutely continuous with a Hölder continuous density near the excited energy. Under this assumption, we show that the survival probability of the excited state decays in an approximately exponential manner on suitable time scales and under favourable conditions, with a decay rate given by Fermi's golden rule for the limiting measure. The error is estimated in terms of the coupling strength and the Lévy distance between the discrete spectral measures and the limiting measure. As an application, we treat a two-level atom coupled to a massless bosonic field confined to a large cavity in the rotating-wave approximation.

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19 pages

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A simple quantum mechanical model consisting of a discrete level resonantly coupled to a continuum of finite width, where the coupling can be varied from perturbative to strong (Fano-Anderson model), is considered. The particle is initially localized at the discrete level, and the time dependence of the amplitude to find the particle at the discrete level is calculated without resorting to perturbation theory. The deviations from the exponential decay law, predicted by the Fermi's Golden Rule, are discussed. We also study analytic structure of the Green's function (GF) for the model. We analyze the GF poles, branch points and Riemann surface, and show how the Fermi's Golden Rule, valid in perturbative regime for not to large time, appears in this context. The knowledge of analytic structure of the GF in frequency representation opens opportunities for obtaining easy for numerical calculations formulas for the GF in time representation, alternative to those using the spectral density.
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