Abstract The dynamics of relativistic particles of spin 0 and 1/2, interacting with an external electromagnetic field and a quantized plane wave, is studied using the path integral framework. We take advantage of the existing properties of the interaction to introduce a delta functional in order to calculate Green's functions. This simply reduces the problem to two coupled oscillators. The energy spectrum and wave functions are calculated for the spin 0 case and the analogy with Jaynes‐Cummings model is made to derive the energy spectrum for the spin 1/2 case.
The dynamics of a qubit in a structured environment is investigated theoretically. One point of view of the model is the spin-boson model with a Lorentz shaped spectral density. An alternative view is a qubit coupled to harmonic oscillator (HO), which in turn coupled to a Ohmic environment. Two different methods are applied and compared for this problem. One is a perturbation method based on a unitary transformation. Since the transformed hamiltonian is of rotating wave approximation (RWA) form, we call it the transformed rotating wave approximation (TRWA) method. And the other one is the numerically exact method of the quasi-adiabatic propagator path-integral (QUAPI) method. TRWA method can be applied from the first point of view. And the QUAPI method can applied from both points of views. We find that from the 1st point of view QUAPI only works well for large
Γ. Since the memory time is too long for the practical evaluation of QUAPI when
Γ is small. We call this treatment as QUAPI1. And from the 2nd point of view, QUAPI works well for small
Γ, since the non-adiabatic effect become more important as
Γ increases, one need smaller time-step and more steps to obtain accurate result which also quickly runs out the computational resources. This treatment is called QUAPI2. We find that the TRWA method works well for the whole parameter range of
Γ and show good agreement with QUAPI1 and QUAPI2. On the other hand, we find that the decoherence of the qubit can be reduced with increasing coupling between HO and bath. This result may be relevant to the design of quantum computer.
This chapter presents a brief introduction to the path-integral method before applying it to the polaron problem. The coupling theory is based on the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics developed by Feynman in 1955. The path-integral formalism proves to be a useful tool for many field-theoretic problems. Feynman's path-integral method as applied by Feynman to determine the polaron effective mass has an intuitive rather than formal basis. The comparison revealed unequivocally the superiority of the Feynman model over the entire range of the coupling constant. Schultz also simulated the Feynman approximation by replacing the whole lattice with a second, fictitious particle harmonically bound to the electron by a spring of constant k. Thus, the Feynman's strong-coupling energy is better than the Landau-Pekar energy with the Gaussian trial function. The numerical results reported by Marshall and Mills show that the second-order correction to the Feynman result for the ground state energy is less than 2% for the entire coupling rang.