Dissipative Quantum Chaos And Decoherence

This overview of the state of the art of research in an exciting field mainly emphasizes the development of a semiclassical formalism that allows one to incorporate the effect of dissipation and decoherence in a precise, yet tractable way into the quantum mechanics of classically chaotic systems.

This overview of the state of the art of research in an exciting field mainly emphasizes the development of a semiclassical formalism that allows one to incorporate the effect of dissipation and decoherence in a precise, yet tractable way into the quantum mechanics of classically chaotic systems.

A unique description of the phenomena that arise from the interaction between quantum systems and their environment. Because of the novel character of the approach discussed, the book addresses scientists from all fields of physics and related disciplines as well as students of physics.

This classic text provides an excellent introduction to a new and rapidly developing field of research. Now well established as a textbook in this rapidly developing field of research, the new edition is much enlarged and covers a host of new results.

Starting from first principles, this book introduces the fundamental concepts and methods of dissipative quantum mechanics and explores related phenomena in condensed matter systems. Major experimental achievements in cooperation with theoretical advances have brightened the field and brought it to the attention of the general community in natural sciences. Nowadays, working knowledge of dissipative quantum mechanics is an essential tool for many physicists. This book -- originally published in 1990 and republished in 1999 and and 2008 as enlarged second and third editions -- delves significantly deeper than ever before into the fundamental concepts, methods and applications of quantum dissipative systems.This fourth edition provides a self-contained and updated account of the quantum mechanics of open systems and offers important new material including the most recent developments. The subject matter has been expanded by about fifteen percent. Many chapters have been completely rewritten to better cater to both the needs of newcomers to the field and the requests of the advanced readership. Two chapters have been added that account for recent progress in the field. This book should be accessible to all graduate students in physics. Researchers will find this a rich and stimulating source.

Initially a subfield of solid state physics, the study of mesoscopic systems has evolved over the years into a vast field of research in its own right. Keeping track its rapid progress, this book provides a broad survey of the latest developments in the field. The focus is on statistics and dynamics of mesoscopic systems with special emphasis on topics like quantum chaos, localization, noise and fluctuations, mesoscopic optics and quantum transport in nanostructures. Written with nonspecialists in mind, this book will also be useful to graduate students wishing to familiarize themselves with this field of research.

A comprehensive summary of experiments on Compton scattering from the proton and neutron performed at the electron accelerator MAMI. The experiments cover a photon energy range from 30 MeV to 500 MeV. The reader is introduced to the theoretical concepts of Compton scattering, followed by a description of the experiments on the proton, their analysis and results.

Bistable quantum systems show in parameter regimes with mixed regular/chaotic dynamics a characteristic phenomenon: chaotic tunneling -- coherent transport between regular islands which are separated by a chaotic layer. In this process, quantum mechanical states which are localized in chaotic regions of phase space, serve as a bridge between regular regions. The fact that chaotic states are typically delocalized, results in enhanced tranport -- for the present case in larger tunneling rates. As the appropriate spectral feature, one finds crossings of chaotic singlets with regular (tunnel) doublets. The influence of dissipation and the related decoherence on this tunnel phenomenon is studied in this work. The harmonically driven double well potential served as a model. It turned out that chaotic tunneling is accompanyed by enhanced decoherence and that the dynamics involves by far more than two levels. In the long term limit it results in a staedy flow between all states whose mean energy is below the barrier. While the influence of the driving has been treated exactly within a Floquet formalism, it was for an efficient description of the dissipative effects neccessary to restrict ourselves to weak dissipation. The applicability of the approximations known from literatur, namely Born-Markov and rotating-wave approximation, has been investigated and a modyfied approach based on the Floquet theorem has been derived. Its quality has been studied by means of an exactly solvable model, the parameterically driven harmonic oscillator. For this model system we derived analytical solutions of the different master equations.

From the 18th to the 30th August 2003 , a NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) was held in Cargèse, Corsica, France. Cargèse is a nice small village situated by the mediterranean sea and the Institut d'Etudes Scientifiques de Cargese provides ? a traditional place to organize Theoretical Physics Summer Schools and Workshops * in a closed and well equiped place. The ASI was an International Summer School on "Chaotic Dynamics and Transport in Classical and Quantum Systems". The main goal of the school was to develop the mutual interaction between Physics and Mathematics concerning statistical properties of classical and quantum dynamical systems. Various experimental and numerical observations have shown new phenomena of chaotic and anomalous transport, fractal structures, chaos in physics accelerators and in cooled atoms inside atom-optics billiards, space-time chaos, fluctuations far from equilibrium, quantum decoherence etc. New theoretical methods have been developed in order to modelize and to understand these phenomena (volume preserving and ergodic dynamical systems, non-equilibrium statistical dynamics, fractional kinetics, coupled maps, space-time entropy, quantum dissipative processes etc). The school gathered a team of specialists from several horizons lecturing and discussing on the achievements, perspectives and open problems (both fundamental and applied).

This volume is devoted to Quantum Decoherence with lectures from the Séminaire Poincaré, held in November 2005 at the Institute Henri Poincaré Paris. The goal of this seminar is to provide up-to-date information about general topics of great interest in physics. Both the theoretical and experimental results are covered, with some historical background. Particular care is devoted to the pedagogical nature of the presentation.