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CRC Press eBooks

Irreversibility from a Reversible Equation

Hiroshi Ezawa, Keiji Watanabe, Koichi Nakamura

Published Nov 27, 2020• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A simple example is taken to show without misty approximations that irreversibility can follow from a reversible equation. The example is a Bose gas having an interaction quadratic in the field operators. It is shown that the particle-number density exhibits diffusion superposed with an oscillatory damping when looked at a macroscopic scales in space and time. Some additional remarks are given.

DOI
10.1201/9781003078296-7

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Introduction To Quantum Relaxation Processes

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The first question to ask about the phenomenon of relaxation is why it occurs at all. Both the Newton and the Schrödinger equations are symmetrical under time reversal: The Newton equation, dx/dt = v ; dv/dt = −∂V/∂x, implies that particles obeying this law of motion will retrace their trajectory back in time after changing the sign of both the time t and the particle velocities v. The Schrödinger equation, ∂ψ/∂t = −(i/.h) Ĥ ψ, implies that if (ψ (t) is a solution then ψ *(−t) is also one, so that observables which depend on |ψ|2 are symmetric in time. On the other hand, nature clearly evolves asymmetrically as asserted by the second law of thermodynamics. How does this asymmetry arise in a system that obeys temporal symmetry in its time evolution? Readers with background in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics have encountered the intuitive answer: Irreversibility in a system with many degrees of freedom is essentially a manifestation of the system “getting lost in phase space”:Asystem starts from a given state and evolves in time. If the number of accessible states is huge, the probability that the system will find its way back to the initial state in finite time is vanishingly small, so that an observer who monitors properties associated with the initial state will see an irreversible evolution. The question is how is this irreversible behavior manifested through the reversible equations of motion, and how does it show in the quantitative description of the time evolution. This chapter provides an introduction to this subject using the time-dependent Schrödinger equation as a starting point. Chapter 10 discusses more advanced aspects of this problem within the framework of the quantum Liouville equation and the density operator formalism.

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We give an example of a mathematical model describing quantum mechanical processes interacting with medium. As a model, we consider the process of heat scattering of a wave function defined on the phase space. We consider the case when the heat diffusion takes place only with respect to momenta. We state and study the corresponding modified Kramers equation for this process. We consider the consequent approximations to this equation in powers of the quantity inverse to the medium resistance per unit of mass of the particle in the process. The approximations are constructed similarly to statistical physics, where from the usual Kramers equation for the evolution of probability density of the Brownian motion of a particle in the phase space, one deduces an approximate description of this process by the Fokker-Planck equation for the density of probability distribution in the configuration space. We prove that the zero (invertible) approximation to our model with respect to the large parameter of the medium resistance, yields the usual quantum mechanical description by the Schrodinger equation with the standard Hamilton operator. We deduce the next approximation to the model with respect to the negative power of the medium resistance coefficient. As a result we obtain the modified Schrodinger equation taking into account dissipation of the process in the initial model, and explaining the decoherence of the wave function.

•Jan 1, 2015•2 citations
A simple example is taken to show without misty approximations that irreversibility can follow from a reversible equation. The example is a Bose gas having an interaction quadratic in the field operators. It is shown that the particle-number density exhibits diffusion superposed with an oscillatory damping when looked at a macroscopic scales in space and time. Some additional remarks are given.
Irreversible microscopic processes (viz intrinsic stochasticities), i.e. processes in which a unitary dynamical group is related to a semi-group of contracting maps, are considered for the following examples: the shift in w.r.t. random walks; the shift in w.r.t. diffusion; the nonrelativistic free Hamiltonian and the relativistic free Hamiltonian of scalar spin-zero particles with rest-mass w.r.t. the corresponding contractive semi-group generated by these operators. The last example is also considered in the context of a particle–antiparticle system, thereby exhibiting an asymmetry between the number of particles and antiparticles. The positive and negative parts of the Hamilton operator of the Dirac equation are calculated and related to an intrinsic stochasticity. For classical Hamiltonian systems an intrinsic stochasticity is defined and applied to examples. Reverse processes and measurements connected with intrinsic stochasticity are defined.
Time-irreversibility of apparently irreversible phenomena observed in quantum systems with a very small number of degrees of freedom is studied quantitatively by a time-reversal test: the system evolved in the forward-time direction is time-reversed after applying a small perturbation at the reversal time and the separation between the time-reversed perturbed and the time-reversed unperturbed states is measured as a function of perturbation strength. If the system exhibits a normal diffusion, the time-reversal characteristics has a universal threshold of perturbation strength above which a complete loss of memory is realized. A remarkable fact is that, for almost all the model systems we examined, including discrete-time/continuous-time systems and deterministic/stochastic systems, the time reversal characteristics as well as the time-reversal dynamics itself converge asymptotically to universal behaviors independent of the details of the systems, which implies the prototype of quantum irreversibility. Only the diffusive behavior of the critical states in Harper equation deviates significantly from the universal behavior.
The irreversibility of quantum mechanical systems perturbed by random forces is investigated by means of phenomonological equations derived from the Schr\"odinger equation. A semiquantitative discussion depending on an assumption of time reversal symmetry of the ensemble of random functions leads to a description of the irreversibility of a system with a finite number of states. A more general quantitative method utilizing "smoothed" density matrices produces a macroscopic description of systems tending to equilibrium states.
The first question to ask about the phenomenon of relaxation is why it occurs at all. Both the Newton and the Schrödinger equations are symmetrical under time reversal: The Newton equation, dx/dt = v ; dv/dt = −∂V/∂x, implies that particles obeying this law of motion will retrace their trajectory back in time after changing the sign of both the time t and the particle velocities v. The Schrödinger equation, ∂ψ/∂t = −(i/.h) Ĥ ψ, implies that if (ψ (t) is a solution then ψ *(−t) is also one, so that observables which depend on |ψ|2 are symmetric in time. On the other hand, nature clearly evolves asymmetrically as asserted by the second law of thermodynamics. How does this asymmetry arise in a system that obeys temporal symmetry in its time evolution? Readers with background in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics have encountered the intuitive answer: Irreversibility in a system with many degrees of freedom is essentially a manifestation of the system “getting lost in phase space”:Asystem starts from a given state and evolves in time. If the number of accessible states is huge, the probability that the system will find its way back to the initial state in finite time is vanishingly small, so that an observer who monitors properties associated with the initial state will see an irreversible evolution. The question is how is this irreversible behavior manifested through the reversible equations of motion, and how does it show in the quantitative description of the time evolution. This chapter provides an introduction to this subject using the time-dependent Schrödinger equation as a starting point. Chapter 10 discusses more advanced aspects of this problem within the framework of the quantum Liouville equation and the density operator formalism.
We give an example of a mathematical model describing quantum mechanical processes interacting with medium. As a model, we consider the process of heat scattering of a wave function defined on the phase space. We consider the case when the heat diffusion takes place only with respect to momenta. We state and study the corresponding modified Kramers equation for this process. We consider the consequent approximations to this equation in powers of the quantity inverse to the medium resistance per unit of mass of the particle in the process. The approximations are constructed similarly to statistical physics, where from the usual Kramers equation for the evolution of probability density of the Brownian motion of a particle in the phase space, one deduces an approximate description of this process by the Fokker-Planck equation for the density of probability distribution in the configuration space. We prove that the zero (invertible) approximation to our model with respect to the large parameter of the medium resistance, yields the usual quantum mechanical description by the Schrodinger equation with the standard Hamilton operator. We deduce the next approximation to the model with respect to the negative power of the medium resistance coefficient. As a result we obtain the modified Schrodinger equation taking into account dissipation of the process in the initial model, and explaining the decoherence of the wave function.