Phenomena of damped harmonic oscillator is important in the description of the elementary dissipative processes of linear responses in our physical world. Its classical description is clear and understood, however it is not so in the quantum physics, where it also has a basic role. Starting from the Rosen-Chambers restricted variation principle a Hamilton like variation approach to the damped harmonic oscillator will be given. The usual formalisms of classical mechanics, as Lagrangian, Hamiltonian, Poisson brackets, will be covered too. We shall introduce two Poisson brackets. The first one has only mathematical meaning and for the second, the so-called constitutive Poisson brackets, a physical interpretation will be presented. We shall show that only the fundamental constitutive Poisson brackets are not invariant throughout the motion of the damped oscillator, but these show a kind of universal time dependence in the universal time scale of the damped oscillator. The quantum mechanical Poisson brackets and commutation relations belonging to these fundamental time dependent classical brackets will be described. Our objective in this work is giving clearer view to the challenge of the dissipative quantum oscillator.
A previously developed novel theory for the formal canonical quantization of classically dissipating systems will be the starting point for a detailed discussion of the quantum statistical aspects of the simple linearly damped harmonic oscillator. The formalism essentially involves complex classical canonical coordinates and momenta, and thus quite naturally leads to the possibility of creation and annihilation operators. Furthermore, the occurrence of quantal noise operators appears to be of principal importance for the conservation of the fundamental commutator in the course of time, as will be expressed in a simple fluctuation-dissipation relation. Making a canonical transformation back to the real, Cartesian Hermitian position and momentum an "effective" Hermitian Hamiltonian will be derived, with which a transformation is made from the Heisenberg frame to the Schr\"odinger frame where the density operator equation will be computed. This will make it obvious that no proper Schr\"odinger equation exists for the dissipative subsystem on its own, thus reflecting an incomplete knowledge. The master equation will then be translated into its Wigner representation. The intimate connection between the diffusion coefficients in the resulting Fokker-Planck equation and the uncertainty relation will be demonstrated in a clear fashion.
The need for a quantum-mechanical formalism for systems with dissipation which is applicable to the radiation field of a cavity is discussed. Two methods that have been used in this connection are described. The first, which starts with the classical Newtonian equation of motion for a damped oscillator and applies the conventional formal quantization techniques, leads to an exact solution; but subsequent discussion shows that this method is invalid, the results being unacceptable from a quantum-mechanical viewpoint. The second method, which considers the interaction of two systems, the lossless oscillator and the loss mechanism, is adopted in the present article. No special model is used for the loss mechanism, but this mechanism is assumed to have a large number of densely-spaced energy states.The approximations with respect to the loss mechanism that underlie the concept of dissipation are discussed. These approximations are then applied to the analysis, and a differential equation for a coordinate operator of the harmonic oscillator is obtained which has the formal appearance of the Newtonian equation of motion for a driven damped harmonic oscillator, the driving term being an operator referring to the loss mechanism. The presence of the driving term is responsible for the difference between the present theory and that of the first method mentioned above. A solution of the differential equation for the coordinate operator is given explicitly. An examination of the physical significance of the solution shows that the driving term is responsible not only for the thermal fluctuations which are due to the loss mechanism, but also for the proper commutation relationship of the conjugate coordinates of the oscillator and for its zero-point fluctuations.A generalization of the solution to provide for a classical driving force and coupled atomic systems is given. The results are then restated in a form that refers to the loss mechanism only through the two parameters by which it is usually described---the dissipation constant and the temperature.
Overdamping is a regime in which friction is sufficiently large that the motion either decays to its equilibrium position or it crosses the equilibrium position exactly once before returning monotonically towards the equilibrium position. The phenomena of overdamping has been studied classically and quantum mechanically only for the case of the linear damped harmonic oscillator. Here we study the classical and quantum dynamics of a family of over-damped non linear systems. The main objective of this paper is to find a Lagrangian and Hamiltonian framework to study over-damped non linear systems and to show that a quantum mechanical description can be developed in the momentum representation. Our results reduce to the well known solution of the linear damped harmonic oscillator when the non linear part is set to zero.
The time-dependent Schrödinger equation is a cornerstone of quantum physics and governs all phenomena of the microscopic world. However, despite its importance, its origin is still not widely appreciated and properly understood. The quantization of the forced harmonic oscillator is studied with the quantum variable (
x ,
v^) , with the commutation relation [
x ,
v^] =
iℏ/
m , and using a Schrödinger’s like equation on these variable, and associating a linear operator to a constant of motion
K(
x,v,t) of the classical system, The comparison with the quantization in the space (
x,p) is done with the usual Schrödinger’s equation for the Hamiltonian
H(
x,p,t), and with the commutation relation [
x ,
p^] =
iℏ. It is found that for the non-resonant case, both forms of quantization bring about the same result. The difference means that the H-approach case brings about more complex behavior in the quantum dynamics than the K-approach case, and that the H-approach case losses more information than the K-approach case.However, for the resonant case, both forms of quantization are different, and the probability for the system to be in the exited state for the (
x ,
v^) quantization has fewer oscillations than the (
x ,
p^) quantization, the average energy of the system is higher in (
x ,
p^) quantization than on the (
x ,
v^) quantization, and the Boltzmann- Shannon entropy on the (
x ,
p^) quantization is higher than on the (
x ,
v^) quantization. The parameter does not appear to be suitable for experimental measurement because the variation in the average value of the energy is quite modest. Entropy is a nice parameter to investigate experimentally because it differs significantly.
In this paper we use the algebraic and the invariant method to study the time-dependent damped harmonic oscillator from classical and quantum points of view. The solution of the classical equation of motion and the wavefunction solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation are found explicitly. We show that the original time-dependent quantum-mechanical problem is completely related to the well known time-independent harmonic oscillator. In addition, we elucidate the intimate connection between the damped harmonic oscillator (DHO) and the generalized harmonic oscillator (GHO). More importantly, the evolution of the states of the DHO cannot be cyclic, in contradistinction with the states of the GHO. Explicit expressions for both the dynamical and the geometric angles and phases are deduced in the adiabatic limit. The coherent states describing the invariant-angle variables of the classical DHO are constructed; they allow us to recover the classical evolution and invariant from the quantum evolution.