A variational ground-state wave vector for a tunneling system coupled to a phonon bath is proposed taking into account the possibility of a symmetry breaking in the initial state of a two-state system. A best upper bound to the ground-state energy is found showing the impossibility of localization due to interaction with a phonon bath.
We present a systematic analysis of the ground state properties of a tunneling system coupled to an Ohmic bath. The nonadiabatic effects induced by coupling with tunneling particle, on the ground state properties of phonons are taken into account. For this we have considered both displacement and deformation of phonons via a variational treatment. The symmetry breaking transition, or the delocalization-localization transition, of the tunneling particle is presented and is compared with earlier known results. We also show that in the critical regime a gap will be opened near the zero momentum in the spectrum of the phonons. The modified phonon spectrum along with the phonon displacement field correlation functions have been calculated. It is shown that in the critical regime the tunneling system stabilizes the lattice against long wavelength fluctuations.
The variational approach is applied to the study of the ground state of quantum tunneling system interacting with two phonons by use of a correlated-squeezed transformation. We fine: 1) For the two phonons bath, the ground state energy of the phonons with correlation effect is lower than that without correlation effect; 2) The effect of correlation varies with the mode parameters: In the resonant regime of the phonons and two-state system, the correlation effect is more significant and will be strengthened together with the increase of coupling coefficient.
The ground state of a two-level system coupled to a dispersionless phonon bath is studied using the coherent approximation method. The ground-state energy and the tunneling reduction factor we obtain are in good agreement with the exact values in the whole parameter space. Since the real ground-state wave functions are well simulated, some other physical information about the system, such as the interaction energy and the interaction phonon numbers in each level and the whole system, are given. The interaction phonon numbers in the two-level system are found to increase with the coupling parameter s. In the intermediate coupling region, phenomenon of the population inversion and a maximum for the interaction phonon numbers versus ${\ensuremath{\delta}}_{0}/s$ have been found. Consisting with the exact results, our results show there is no evidence of the discontinuous localization-delocalization transition.
A new variational approach is proposed to study the ground-state of a two-level system coupled to a dispersionless phonon bath. By the extended coherent state, where the more phonon correlations are easily incorporated, we can obtain very accurate ground state energy and the tunnelling reduction factor in all regime of tunnelling matrix element d0 and coupling parameter s. The relative difference between the present ones and those by exact numerical diagonalization is less then 0.001%. In addition, some simple analytical results are given in the limits of δ 0 /s ↠ 0 and ∞.