Physical Review Letters
Reduced System Dynamics from theN-Body Schrödinger Equation
A. Muriel
Abstract
We derive the time-dependent wave function for one particle in the company of $N\ensuremath{-}1$ other particles using the method of iterated projection. Using this approach, we confirm the general philosophy of describing a quantum system by a flow component and another component which may be given various descriptions as stochastic, heat bath, or quantum jump processes. The possible equivalence of the Breuer-Petruccione reduced system dynamics [Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 3788 (1995)] and ours is explored.