In this work, we consider a particle moving in front of a dielectric plate and study two of the most relevant effects of the vacuum field fluctuations: the dissipation and the decoherence of the particle's internal degrees of freedom. We consider the particle to follow a classical, macroscopically fixed trajectory. To study the dissipative effects, we calculate the in-out effective action by functionally integrating over the vacuum field and the microscopic degrees of freedom of both the plate and the particle. This in-out effective action develops an imaginary part and, hence, a nonvanishing probability for the decay (because of friction) of the initial vacuum state. We analyze how the dissipation is affected by the relative velocity between the particle and the plate and the properties of the microscopic degrees of freedom. In order to study the effects of decoherence over the internal degrees of freedom of the particle, we calculate the closed time path or Schwinger-Keldysh influence action, by functionally integrating over the vacuum field and the microscopic degrees of freedom of the plate. We estimate the decoherence time as the time needed by two different quantum configurations (of the internal degree of freedom of the particle) to be possible to differentiate from one another. We analyze the way in which the presence of the mirror affects the decoherence and the possible ways to maximize or reduce its effects.
We construct generalizations of the Calogero-Sutherland-Moser system by appropriately reducing a model involving many unitary matrices. The resulting systems consist of particles on the circle with internal degrees of freedom, coupled through modifications of the inverse-square potential. The coupling involves SU(M) non-invariant (anti)ferromagnetic interactions of the internal degrees of freedom. The systems are shown to be integrable and the spectrum and wavefunctions of the quantum version are derived.
In this paper, the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree for bosons (MCTDHB) method is derived for the case of
N identical bosons with internal degrees of freedom. The theory for bosons with internal degrees of freedom constitutes a generalization of the MCTDHB method that substantially enriches the many-body physics that can be described. We demonstrate that the numerically exact solution of the time-dependent many-body Schr\"odinger equation for interacting bosonic particles with internal degrees of freedom is now feasible. We report on the MCTDHB equations of motion for bosons with internal degrees of freedom and their implementation for a general many-body Hamiltonian with one-body and two-body terms, both of which may depend on the internal states of the considered particles and time. To demonstrate the capabilities of the theory and its software implementation integrated in the mctdh-x software, we apply MCTDHB to the emergence of fragmentation of parabolically trapped bosons with two internal states: we study the ground state of
N=100 bosons as a function of the separation between the state-dependent minima of the two parabolic potentials. To quantify the coherence of the system, we compute its normalized first-order correlation function. We find that the coherence within each internal state of the atoms is maintained, while it is lost between the different internal states. This is a hallmark of a kind of fragmentation absent in bosons without internal structure. We term the emergent phenomenon ``composite fragmentation.''