Dynamical Processes in Exactly Solvable Quantum Mechanical Systems I.
Sachiko Kitajima, Fumiaki Shibata · Journal of the Physical Society of Japan · 2000
Decoherence and relaxation processes in quantum systems are studied on the basis of an exactly solvable model. That is, a generalized Coleman-Hepp model is analyzed in a framework of a spin coherent state representation which enables us to determine time evolution of the whole system as successive applications of rotation operators. A density matrix of the whole system and reduced density matrices of constituent subsystems are obtained to yield quasi-probability densities and averages of observables of an incident particle and a detector (reservoir) system. Numerical evaluation of these quantities is performed to find decoherence like phenomena for larger values of N (a number of detector spins) and S l (magnitude of a detector spin). An appearance of a mixed state (i.e., vanishing of off-diagonal elements of a reduced matrix) is explicitly shown when N and/or S l become infinity. Namely, this occurs in the thermodynamic limit ( N →∞) and/or in the classical apparatus limit ( S l →∞).