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Journal of Mathematical Physics

On the quantization of linearly damped harmonic oscillator

Sunita Srivastava, Vishwamittar, I. S. Minhas

Published Jun 1, 1991• 9 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Using the equation of motion for a linearly damped harmonic oscillator as fundamental equation, a condition has been obtained that must be satisfied by its Lagrangian and a number of functional forms has been critically investigated. The Lagrangians that successfully describe a classical damped oscillator have been quantized using Feynman’s elegant path integral method. However, it is found that the expectation value of energy of the damped oscillator in all the cases becomes infinitely large for t→∞, ruling out the possibility of treating the damped quantum system as a one-body problem.

DOI
10.1063/1.529258

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Using the equation of motion for a linearly damped harmonic oscillator as fundamental equation, a condition has been obtained that must be satisfied by its Lagrangian and a number of functional forms has been critically investigated. The Lagrangians that successfully describe a classical damped oscillator have been quantized using Feynman’s elegant path integral method. However, it is found that the expectation value of energy of the damped oscillator in all the cases becomes infinitely large for t→∞, ruling out the possibility of treating the damped quantum system as a one-body problem.
An explicitly time independent Lagrangian functional of a three-dimensional damped harmonic oscillator has been proposed. I derive results for the motion of the three-dimensional damped harmonic oscillator with a pure imaginary three dimensional vector and oscillator’s position-dependent friction coefficient. The Hamiltonians corresponding to the Lagrangian is also explicitly time independent. The choice of functional form of the friction coefficient on the oscillator position determines and plays a vital role in the form of the equation of motion classically and quantum mechanically. One choice of the form of the friction coefficient I made lead to breaking the symmetry of the isotropy of oscillations in the three dimensional space.
In this paper, a new approach for constructing Lagrangians for driven and undriven linearly damped systems is proposed, by introducing a redefined time coordinate and an associated coordinate transformation to ensure that the resulting Lagrangian satisfies the Helmholtz conditions. The approach is applied to canonically quantize the damped harmonic oscillator and although it predicts an energy spectrum that decays at the same rate to previous models, unlike those approaches it recovers the classical critical damping condition, which determines transitions between energy eigenstates, and is therefore consistent with the correspondence principle. It is also demonstrated how to apply the procedure to a driven damped harmonic oscillator.
In this paper, an alternative approach for constructing Lagrangians for driven and undriven linearly damped systems is proposed, by introducing a redefined time coordinate and an associated coordinate transformation to ensure that the resulting Lagrangian satisfies the Helmholtz conditions. The approach is applied to canonically quantize the damped harmonic oscillator and although it predicts an energy spectrum that decays at the same rate to previous models, unlike those approaches it recovers the classical critical damping condition, which determines transitions between energy eigenstates, and is therefore consistent with the correspondence principle. It is also demonstrated how to apply the procedure to a driven damped harmonic oscillator.
Damped mechanical systems with various forms of damping are quantized using the path integral formalism. In particular, we obtain the path integral kernel for the linearly damped harmonic oscillator and a particle in a uniform gravitational field with linearly or quadratically damped motion. In each case, we study the evolution of Gaussian wave packets and discuss the characteristic features that help us distinguish between different types of damping. For quadratic damping we show the connection of the action and equation of motion to a zero-dimensional version of a scalar field theory. We also demonstrate that the equation of motion for quadratic damping can be identified as a geodesic equation in a fictitious two-dimensional space.
The problem of a quantal harmonic oscillator with damping and a time-dependent frequency acted on by a time-dependent perturbative force is exactly solved. The wavefunctions are found in Schrödinger representation using the theory of explicitly time-dependent invariants and also by an expansion of the Feynman propagator. The propagator is obtained in exactly closed form by an explicit path integration of the classical Lagrangian. It is found that the wavefunctions and the propagator depend only on the solution of classical damped oscillator through a single function ρ (t). The function ρ (t) itself may be obtained as a solution of a second order nonlinear differential equation under the appropriate set of initial conditions.
An approach to quantization of the damped harmonic oscillator (DHO) is developed on the basis of a modified Bateman Lagrangian (MBL); thereby some quantum mechanical aspects of the DHO are clarified. We treat the energy operator for the DHO, in addition to the Hamiltonian operator that is determined from the MBL and corresponds to the total energy of the system. It is demonstrated that the energy eigenvalues of the DHO exponentially decrease with time and that transitions between the energy eigenstates occur in accordance with the Schr\"odinger equation. Also, it is pointed out that a new critical parameter discriminates different behaviors of transition probabilities.