Our main goal in this paper is to extend to any system of coupled quadratic Hamiltonians some properties known for systems of quantum harmonic oscillators related with the Brownian Quantum Motion model. In a first part we get a rather general formula for the purity (or the linear entropy) in a short time approximation. In a second part we establish a master equation (or a Fokker-Planck type equation) for the time evolution of the reduced matrix density for bilinearly coupled quadratic Hamiltonians. The Hamiltonians and the bilinear coupling can be time dependent. Moreover we give an explicit formula for the solution of this master equation so that the time evolution of the reduced density at time
t is connected with the reduced density at initial time
t0 for $t_0 \leq t
This chapter considers the interaction between a single degree of freedom and an environment. It assumes that the environment can be represented by a set of harmonic oscillators, and that the interaction between the system of interest and the environment is linear in the coupling to the oscillator degrees of freedom. There are systems where the linear coupling to the environment degrees of freedom is exact, such as the fundamental interaction of a charged particle interacting with the electromagnetic field, electron-photon interaction. Furthermore, many situations are adequately described by such an interaction, because it is sufficient to consider each environment degree of freedom only weakly perturbed. The chapter examines the time evolution of the reduced density matrix on integral form, and described the diagrammatic expansion in the spatial representation. It explores the kinetic approach for studying the motion of a particle interacting with an oscillator environment.
In this chapter we study some properties of systems of coupled quadratic quantum Hamiltonians. The well known example is coupled harmonic oscillators appearing in the Quantum Brownian Motion. An open system is a physical (S) interacting with the environment (E) such that the total system
(S∪E) is isolated from the rest of the universe. So we have two independent Hamiltonians
H^S,
H^E and an interaction
V^ between (S) and (E). The main problem discussed for open systems is to understand the dynamical action of the interaction
V^ with the environment on the time dependent evolution of (S) which is now irreversible because a part of its energy escapes to the environment. An important physical effect of the interaction of the environment on a quantum system is decoherence which give an explanation for the mechanism driving the quantum-to-classical transition. We restrict ourself to few mathematical problems related with this very active field of research in physics [155, 200, 231, 270]. In a first part we study the purity of a state of (S) (or the linear entropy) in a short time approximation. In a second part we discuss the separability of bipartite systems. In a third part we establish a master equation (or a Fokker-Planck type equation) for the time evolution of the reduced matrix density for coupled quadratic Hamiltonians by a bilinear inter-action. We give an explicit formula for the solution of this master equation so that the time evolution of the reduced density at time t is written as a convolution integral for the reduced density at initial time
t0=0, with a Gaussian kernel, for
0≤t<tc where
tc∈]0,∞] is a critical time such that reversibility is lost for
t>tc if
tc<+∞. Some manifestations of decoherence, for
t>0 small enough, are proved on our simple model which is similar to a representation of the Schrödinger cat.
Several techniques to solve a hierarchical set of equations of motion for propagating a reduced density matrix coupled to a thermal bath have been developed in recent years. This is either done using the path integral technique as in the original proposal by Tanimura and Kubo [J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. 58, 101 (1998)] or by the use of stochastic fields as done by Yan et al. [Chem. Phys. Lett. 395, 216 (2004)]. Based on the latter ansatz a compact derivation of the hierarchy using a decomposition of the spectral density function is given in the present contribution. The method is applied to calculate the time evolution of the reduced density matrix describing the motion in a harmonic, an anharmonic, and two coupled oscillators where each system is coupled to a thermal bath. Calculations to several orders in the system-bath coupling with two different truncations of the hierarchy are performed. The respective density matrices are used to calculate the time evolution of various system properties and the results are compared and discussed with a special focus on the convergence with respect to the truncation scheme applied.
Abstract This chapter introduces the density operator and the Liouville equation and outlines how reduced dynamical description of open quantum systems naturally leads to the appearance of relaxation processes. (1) The density operator and the quantum Liouville equation (the density matrix for a pure system, statistical mixtures, representations, coherences, thermodynamic equilibrium). (2) An example: The time evolution of a two-level system in the density matrix formalism. (3) Reduced descriptions. (4) Time evolution equations for reduced density operators: The quantum master equation (projection operators, The Nakajima–Zwanzig equation, Derivation of the quantum master equation using the thermal projector, The quantum master equation in the interaction representation, The Markovian limit—the Redfield equation, The secular approximation and the Lindblad equation). (5) The Lindblad equation in the ‘Heisenberg representation’. (6) Relaxation of a two-level system and a harmonic oscillator revisited. (7) The optically driven two-level system in a thermal environment—the Bloch equations. (8) The oscillating dipole model of a two-level molecule. (9) Analogy of a coupled two-level system to a spin ½ system in a magnetic field.
Time evolution of the expectation values of various dynamical operators of the harmonic oscillator with dissipation is analitically obtained within the framework of the Lindblad theory for open quantum systems. We deduce the density matrix of the damped harmonic oscillator from the solution of the Fokker-Planck equation for the coherent state representation, obtained from the master equation for the density operator. The Fokker-Planck equation for the Wigner distribution function, subject to either the Gaussian type or the
δ-function type of initial conditions, is also solved by using the Wang-Uhlenbeck method. The obtained Wigner functions are two-dimensional Gaussians with different widths.