The radiation field can be regarded as a collection of independent harmonic oscillators and, as such, constitutes
a heat bath. Moreover, the known form of its interaction with charged particles provides a "rosetta stone"
for deciding on and interpreting the correct interaction for the more general case of a quantum particle in an
external potential and coupled to an arbitrary heat bath. In particular, combining QED with the machinery
of stochastic physics, enables the usual scope of applications to be widened. We discuss blackbody radiation effects on: the equation of motion of a radiating electron (obtaining an equation of motion which is free from runaway solutions), anomalous diffusion, the spreading of a Gaussian wave packet, and decoherence effects due to zero-point oscillations. In addition, utilizing a formula we obtained for the free energy of an oscillator in a heat bath, enables us to determine all the quantum thermodynamic functions of interest (particularly in the areas of quantum information and nanophysics where small systems are involved) and from which we obtain temperature dependent Lamb shifts, quantum effects on the entropy at low temperature and implications for Nernst's law.
A wide variety of dissipative and fluctuation problems involving a quantum system in a heat bath can be described by the independent-oscillator (IO) model Hamiltonian. Using Heisenberg equations of motion, this leads to a generalized quantum Langevin equation (QLE) for the quantum system involving two quantities which encapsulate the properties of the heat bath. Applications include: atomic energy shifts in a blackbody radiation heat bath; solution of the problem of runaway solutions in QED; electrical circuits (resistively shunted Josephson barrier, microscopic tunnel junction, etc.); conductivity calculations (since the QLE gives a natural separation between dissipative and fluctuation forces); dissipative quantum tunneling; noise effects in gravitational wave detectors; anomalous diffusion; strongly driven quantum systems; decoherence phenomena; analysis of Unruh radiation and entropy for a dissipative system.
Recent studies suggest that both the quantum Zeno (increase of the natural lifetime of an unstable quantum state by repeated measurements) and anti-Zeno (decrease of the natural lifetime) effects can be made manifest in the same system by simply changing the dissipative decay rate associated with the environment. Here, we
present a model which incorporates the effect of the environment in an exact manner leading to a confirmation of this expectation.
Conference Committee Involvement (1)
Noise and Fluctuations in Photonics, Quantum Optics, and Communications
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