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Journal of Physics A Mathematical and General

Generalisation of Wigner's theorem for dissipative quantum systems

Nicolas Gisin

Published Feb 1, 1986• 22 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The author presents a quantum Langevin equation in the Schrodinger picture. The friction term is motivated by a natural generalisation of Wigner's theorem or, equivalently, of Dirac's superposition principle. The author applies the model to spin relaxation and to the Brownian motion of the harmonic oscillator. In both cases the state vectors evolve asymptotically to a distribution which has the Gibbs state as corresponding density matrix. It is shown that for any initial state, the harmonic oscillator tends to a coherent state.

DOI
10.1088/0305-4470/19/2/016

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The author presents a quantum Langevin equation in the Schrodinger picture. The friction term is motivated by a natural generalisation of Wigner's theorem or, equivalently, of Dirac's superposition principle. The author applies the model to spin relaxation and to the Brownian motion of the harmonic oscillator. In both cases the state vectors evolve asymptotically to a distribution which has the Gibbs state as corresponding density matrix. It is shown that for any initial state, the harmonic oscillator tends to a coherent state.
The Brownian motion of a harmonic oscillator is treated quantum-mechanically and the same method is applied to the relaxation of a spin. The method is quite general and applicable to a system displaced from the equilibrium state by an arbitrary amount initially. The oscillator or the spin is interacting with a thermostat composed of a great number of harmonic oscillators. The equation of motion is solved in operator form taking average as to the thermostat to the second order of the interaction parameter. The Langevin equation, the Kramers-Chandra-sekhar equation for a harmonic oscillator and the Bloch equation for a static field are derived.
Abstract We propose a Langevin equation to describe the quantum Brownian motion of bounded particles based on a distinctive formulation concerning both the fluctuation and dissipation forces. The fluctuation force is similar to that employed in the classical case. It is a white noise with a variance proportional to the temperature. The dissipation force is not restricted to be proportional to the velocity and is determined in a way as to guarantee that the stationary state is given by a density operator of the Gibbs canonical type. To this end we derived an equation that gives the time evolution of the density operator, which turns out to be a quantum Fokker–Planck–Kramers equation. The approach is applied to the harmonic oscillator in which case the dissipation force is found to be non Hermitian and proportional to the velocity and position.
Traditionally, quantum Brownian motion is described by Fokker-Planck or diffusion equations in terms of quasiprobability distribution functions, e.g., Wigner functions. These often become singular or negative in the full quantum regime. In this paper a simple approach to non-Markovian theory of quantum Brownian motion using true probability distribution functions is presented. Based on an initial coherent state representation of the bath oscillators and an equilibrium canonical distribution of the quantum mechanical mean values of their coordinates and momenta, we derive a generalized quantum Langevin equation in c numbers and show that the latter is amenable to a theoretical analysis in terms of the classical theory of non-Markovian dynamics. The corresponding Fokker-Planck, diffusion, and Smoluchowski equations are the exact quantum analogs of their classical counterparts. The present work is independent of path integral techniques. The theory as developed here is a natural extension of its classical version and is valid for arbitrary temperature and friction (the Smoluchowski equation being considered in the overdamped limit).
Time evolution of the expectation values of various dynamical operators of the harmonic oscillator with dissipation is analitically obtained within the framework of the Lindblad's theory for open quantum systems. We deduce the density matrix of the damped harmonic oscillator from the solution of the Fokker-Planck equation for the coherent state representation, obtained from the master equation for the density operator. The Fokker-Planck equation for the Wigner distribution function is also solved by using the Wang-Uhlenbeck method of transforming it into a linearized partial differential equation for the Wigner function, subject to either the Gaussian type or the δδδ-function type of initial conditions. The Wigner functions which we obtain are two-dimensional Gaussians with different widths.
We consider a driven quantum harmonic oscillator strongly coupled to a heat bath. Starting from the exact quantum Langevin equation, we use a Green's function approach to determine the corresponding semiclassical equation for the Wigner phase space distribution. In the limit of high friction and high temperature, we apply Brinkman's method to derive the quantum Smoluchowski equation for the probability distribution in position space. We further determine the range of validity of the equation and discuss the special case of a Brownian parametric oscillator.