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Progress of Theoretical Physics

Quantum Interference of a Damped Particle

Shinichiro Ohtsuka, Susumu Kurihara

Published May 1, 2002• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

We study the influence of damping on quantum interference of a particle in free space and in a harmonic potential. Using the influence-functional method, it is shown that the suppression of quantum interference is described by the ratio of the thermal diffusion induced by the environment to the quantum-mechanical diffusion. We describe the interference pattern as a function of the friction constant and the temperature, and discuss the difference between the strong damping limit and the classical limit.

DOI
10.1143/ptp.107.889

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We study the influence of damping on quantum interference of a particle in free space and in a harmonic potential. Using the influence-functional method, it is shown that the suppression of quantum interference is described by the ratio of the thermal diffusion induced by the environment to the quantum-mechanical diffusion. We describe the interference pattern as a function of the friction constant and the temperature, and discuss the difference between the strong damping limit and the classical limit.
This paper reports the result of a calculation which shows the effect of damping on the quantum interference of two Gaussian wave packets in a harmonic potential. We use the influence-functional method, which seems to be the most appropriate one for this kind of calculation. It is shown that quantum interference effects are severely diminished by the presence of damping even when its influence on the system is only light. The corrections to the undamped formulas are always expressible in terms of the phenomenological damping constant \ensuremath{\gamma}, the temperature T (in the high-temperature limit), the cutoff frequency (\ensuremath{\Omega}) of the reservoir oscillators, and the mean number (N) of quanta of energy initially present in the system. Both weakly and strongly damped systems are analyzed in the regime of low and high temperatures.
We use a Markovian master equation to solve for the dynamics of a free particle damped by the coupling of its coordinate to a bath of harmonic oscillators. In the coordinate basis the reduced density matrix for the free particle tends to be diagonalized. Considering the evolution of an initial superposition of two plane waves, we find that the interference-pattern fringe contrast is decreased by the damping. However, for fixed times and sufficiently large damping, the fringe contrast increases with increasing damping. Considering an initial coordinate-space Gaussian wave function, we find that for sufficiently large damping the coupling to the environment models a quantum measurement of the particle's coordinate.
In this Brief Report we analyze the limit of very weak damping of a quantum-mechanical Brownian oscillator. It is shown that the propagator for the reduced density operator of the oscillator can be written as a double path integral of the same form as that obtained in the high-temperature limit. As a direct consequence, we can write a Fokker-Planck equation for the reduced density operator of the weakly damped oscillator (at any temperature) involving only the damping and a generalized diffusion constant in momentum space.
We investigate the exact quantum dynamics of a free particle damped through its interaction with an harmonic bath, when the effective coupling strength behaves as ωδ at low frequency. We find that various regimes can occur depending on the value of δ and of the temperature. At large times, the mean square displacement is shown either to diverge as tv, the exponent v being never greater than 2 or to tend towards a finite value, indicating a confinement in the broad sense. In addition, for δ < 1, an oscillation (absent in the uncoupled system) is found : due to the friction on the dominant low-frequency modes and to the existence of retardation effects, the particle is forced to relax in the mean towards its initial location, the net dynamical effect of the bath being similar to that of an applied potential. In the limit δ → 0, the particle is frozen.
The quantum theory of a damped harmonic oscillator is developed by considering an exactly solvable model, previously discussed by Unruh and Zurek [Phys. Rev. D 40, 1071 (1989)]. A one-dimensional harmonic oscillator is coupled to a scalar field. The field is assumed to be initially in thermal equilibrium. The Heisenberg equations of motion are solved without approximation, and the first and second moments, 〈q(t)〉, 〈p(t)〉, 〈q2{\mathit{q}}^{2}q2(t)〉, 〈p2{\mathit{p}}^{2}p2(t)〉, and 〈q(t)p(t)+p(t)q(t)〉 of the coordinate and momentum of the oscillator are calculated. The high-temperature, zero-temperature, free-particle, and weak-damping limits are discussed. A Wigner function of Gaussian form is constructed. The density-matrix equation derived by Louisell $[---Quantum Statistical Properties of Radiation (Wiley, New York, 1973)] is examined and shown to have a solution in agreement with our weak-damping limit.
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.