English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

Quantum approach to the thermalization of the toppling pencil interacting with a finite bath

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons289372

Choudhury,  Sreeja L.
Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)

2111.10181.pdf
(Preprint), 3MB

Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Choudhury, S. L., & Grossmann, F. (2022). Quantum approach to the thermalization of the toppling pencil interacting with a finite bath. Physical Review A, 105(1): 022201. doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.105.022201.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000A-1EC8-4
Abstract
We investigate the longstanding problem of thermalization of quantum systems coupled to an environment by focusing on a bistable quartic oscillator interacting with a finite number of harmonic oscillators. In order to overcome the exponential wall that one usually encounters in grid-based approaches to solve the time-dependent Schrodinger equation of the extended system, methods based on the time-dependent variational principle are best suited. Here we will apply the method of coupled coherent states [D. V. Shalashilin and M. S. Child, J. Chem. Phys. 113, 10028 (2000)]. By investigating the dynamics of an initial wave function on top of the barrier of the double well, it will be shown that only a handful of oscillators with suitably chosen frequencies, starting in their ground states, is enough to drive the bistable system close to its uncoupled ground state. The long-time average of the double-well energy is found to be a monotonously decaying function of the number of environmental oscillators in the parameter range that was numerically accessible.