A microscopic approach treating the quantum dissipation process presented by Sun and Yu (Phys. Rev. A49 (1994) 592; A51 (1995) 1845) is invoked to construct the wavefunction of the composite system—the model for a harmonic oscillator interacting with a many-oscillator bath under the rotating wave approximation. It shows the back-action of the system on the bath. In particular, the dynamic evolution of the wavefunction for the composite system maintains a factorized form in its wavefunction. In the limited temperature, the reduced density matrix for the system is also calculated to clarify the influence of Brownian motion on the system.
A microscopic approach treating the quantum dissipation process presented by Sun and Yu (Phys. Rev. A49 (1994) 592; A51 (1995) 1845) is invoked to construct the wavefunction of the composite system—the model for a harmonic oscillator interacting with a many-oscillator bath under the rotating wave approximation. It shows the back-action of the system on the bath. In particular, the dynamic evolution of the wavefunction for the composite system maintains a factorized form in its wavefunction. In the limited temperature, the reduced density matrix for the system is also calculated to clarify the influence of Brownian motion on the system.
In this paper, a microscopic approach treating the quantum dissipation process presented by Yu and Sun [Phys. Rev. A 49, 592 (1994); 51, 1845 (1995)] is developed to analyze the wave function structure for the dynamic evolution of a typical dissipative system---a single-mode boson soaked in a bath of many bosons. The wave function of the total system is explicitly obtained as a product of two components of the system and bath in a coherent state representation. It not only describes the influence of the bath on the variable of the system through the Brownian motion, but also manifests the back-action of the system on the bath and the mutual interaction among the bosons of bath. Due to the back-action, the total wave function can only be partially factorizable even if the Brownian motion can be completely ignored in certain cases, e.g., weak coupling and large detuning. The semiclassical implication of the back-action, the mutual interaction, and the Brownian motion in the present model are also discussed by considering the wave packet evolution of the dissipative system in the coordinate representation.
We study the quantum dynamics of the simplest dissipative system, a particle moving in a constant external field and interacting with a bath of harmonic oscillators with Ohmic spectral density. Applying the main idea and methods developed in our recent work [L. H. Yu and C. P. Sun, Phys. Rev. A 49, 592 (1994)] to this system, we obtain the simple and exact solutions for the coordinate operator of the system in the Heisenberg picture and the wave function of the composite system of the system and the bath in the Schr\"odinger picture. An effective Hamiltonian for the dissipative system is explicitly derived from these solutions. The meaning of the wave function described by this effective Hamiltonian is clarified by analyzing the effect of the Brownian motion. In particular, the general effective Hamiltonian for an arbitrary potential is directly derived with this method for the case when the Brownian motion can be ignored. Using this effective Hamiltonian, we show an interesting result that the dissipation suppresses the wave-packet spreading.
The aim of this paper is to investigate dynamical properties of a harmonic oscillator coupled to a non-equilibrium bath without the rotating wave approximation. At first, we investigate the theory of this model and obtain the Heisenberg equations of motion for the oscillator and bath annihilation operators in the absence and in the presence of a rotating wave approximation. Then, we obtain the fluctuation and fluctuation-dissipation relations in the absence and in the presence of a rotating wave approximation for the non-equilibrium bath annihilation operator, respectively. After that, we study the decay of system modes using the Wigner-Weisskopf approximation. Finally, we calculate the time-dependent spectrum of a cavity field mode coupled to a non-equilibrium reservoir. We show that even under the condition in which the RWA is considered to be valid (weak interaction), there are significant effects of virtual-photon field on the diffusion coefficient, the energy density, line width and the shift frequency.
We study a new model for treating quantum dissipative systems, in which the bath is modeled as a collection of spins coupled to the system of interest. We develop a quasiclassical method to study this model, approximating the quantum Heisenberg equations by the classical ones, supplemented with stochastic initial conditions carefully chosen so that the results obtained from the classical equations are as close as possible to the quantum results. Using this method we compare the dynamics of such a spin–spin system with that of a spin–boson system, in which the bath is modeled as a collection of harmonic oscillators. We verify numerically that when the system-bath coupling is spread over many bath spins (the Brownian motion limit), the spin–spin model can be mapped on the spin–boson model (although with a temperature dependent spectral density). We also demonstrate that the two dissipative models are qualitatively very different in a non-Brownian motion regime.
Classical Brownian motion has well been investigated since the pioneering work of Einstein, which inspired mathematicians to lay the theoretical foundation of stochastic processes. A stochastic formulation for quantum dynamics of dissipative systems described by the system-plus-bath model has been developed and found many applications in chemical dynamics, spectroscopy, quantum transport, and other fields. This article provides a tutorial review of the stochastic formulation for quantum dissipative dynamics. The key idea is to decouple the interaction between the system and the bath by virtue of the Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation or Itô calculus so that the system and the bath are not directly entangled during evolution, rather they are correlated due to the complex white noises introduced. The influence of the bath on the system is thereby defined by an induced stochastic field, which leads to the stochastic Liouville equation for the system. The exact reduced density matrix can be calculated as the stochastic average in the presence of bath-induced fields. In general, the plain implementation of the stochastic formulation is only useful for short-time dynamics, but not efficient for long-time dynamics as the statistical errors go very fast. For linear and other specific systems, the stochastic Liouville equation is a good starting point to derive the master equation. For general systems with decomposable bath-induced processes, the hierarchical approach in the form of a set of deterministic equations of motion is derived based on the stochastic formulation and provides an effective means for simulating the dissipative dynamics. A combination of the stochastic simulation and the hierarchical approach is suggested to solve the zero-temperature dynamics of the spin-boson model. This scheme correctly describes the coherent-incoherent transition (Toulouse limit) at moderate dissipation and predicts a rate dynamics in the overdamped regime. Challenging problems such as the dynamical description of quantum phase transition (local- ization) and the numerical stability of the trace-conserving, nonlinear stochastic Liouville equation are outlined.
Applying a technique developed recently [L. H. Yu and C. P. Sun, Phys. Rev. A 49, 592 (1994); L. H. Yu, Phys. Lett. 202, 167 (1995)] for a harmonic oscillator coupled to a bath of harmonic oscillators, we present an exact solution for the tunneling problem in an Ohmic dissipative system with inverted harmonic potential. The result shows that while the dissipation tends to suppress the tunneling, the Brownian motion tends to enhance the tunneling. Whether the tunneling rate increases or not would then depend on the initial conditions. We give a specific formula to calculate the tunneling probability determined by various parameters and the initial conditions. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.