Stochastic description for open quantum systems

Esteban Calzetta, Albert Roura and Enric Verdaguer

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2003, vol. 319, issue C, 188-212

Abstract: A linear quantum Brownian motion model with a general spectral density function is considered. In the framework of the influence functional formalism, a Langevin equation can be introduced to describe the system's fully quantum properties even beyond the semiclassical regime. In particular, we show that the reduced Wigner function for the system can be formally written as a double average over both the initial conditions and the stochastic source of the Langevin equation. This is exploited to provide a derivation of the master equation for the reduced density matrix alternative to those existing in the literature. Furthermore, we prove that all the correlation functions obtained in the context of the stochastic description associated to the Langevin equation actually correspond to quantum correlation functions for system observables. In doing so, we also compute the closed time path generating functional of the open system.

Keywords: Open quantum systems; Langevin equation; Quantum Brownian motion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437102015212
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:319:y:2003:i:c:p:188-212

DOI: 10.1016/S0378-4371(02)01521-2

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().