Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 4909 - 4913 (1999)

Quantum Trajectories for Brownian Motion

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Walter T. Strunz1, Lajos Diósi2, Nicolas Gisin3, and Ting Yu3
1Fachbereich Physik, Universität GH Essen, 45117 Essen, Germany
2Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics, POB 49, 1525 Budapest 114, Hungary
3Group of Applied Physics, University of Geneva, 1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland

Received 30 July 1999

We present the stochastic Schrödinger equation for the dynamics of a quantum particle coupled to a high temperature environment and apply it to the dynamics of a driven, damped, nonlinear quantum oscillator. Apart from an initial slip on the environmental memory time scale, in the mean, our result recovers the solution of the known non-Lindblad quantum Brownian motion master equation. A remarkable feature of our powerful stochastic approach is its localization property: individual quantum trajectories remain localized wave packets for all times, even for the classically chaotic system considered here, the localization being stronger as ħ→0.


©1999 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v83/p4909
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.83.4909
PACS: 05.40.Jc, 03.65.Sq, 05.45.Mt, 42.50.Lc

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