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Semiclassical initial value methods for dissipative quantum systems

Subject Area Optics, Quantum Optics and Physics of Atoms, Molecules and Plasmas
Term from 2006 to 2014
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 21399297
 
Final Report Year 2015

Final Report Abstract

In the two projects we have extended and used time-dependent semiclassical methodology with the aim to describe the complex interplay between a quantum system of interest and its environment. The quantum-classical transition has been in the focus of interest, as well as thermalization due to coupling to a bath of a well-defined temperature. Fully quantum mechanically, this endeavor is impossible, due to the exponential increase of the numerical effort with the number of degrees of freedom. We have followed two different, complementary strategies in the course of the projects. Firstly, the non-Markovian dynamics that ensues in a reduced description was tackled by a combined sampling strategy of the semiclassical phase space integral as well as the noise averaging due to the non-Markovian dynamics. Secondly, a large enough subset of the bath degrees of freedom was treated explicitly, albeit on a different level of accuracy, compared to the dynamics of the system of interest. This way, we have studied harmonic as well as anharmonic oscillators in different environments. Converged dynamics of such coupled systems has been reported until thermalization was reached. Furthermore, theoretically predicted blue shifts of the system’s frequency as well as transition to classicality were reproduced in numerical simulations of the reduced density matrix of the system of interest. A system of special experimental relevance that was studied is the Iodine molecule in a rare gas matrix (the “bath”). We could show that non-Gaussian distortions in the bath’s density matrix appear as a function of time, which is an indication of the non-classicality of the bath dynamics.

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