No Arabic abstract
I review the generating function for quantum-statistical mechanics, known as the Feynman-Vernon influence functional, the decoherence functional, or the Schwinger-Keldysh path integral. I describe a probability-conserving $ivarepsilon$ prescription from a path-integral implementation of Lindblad evolution. I also explain how to generalize the formalism to accommodate out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs), leading to a Larkin-Ovchinnikov path integral. My goal is to provide step-by-step calculations of path integrals associated to the harmonic oscillator.
We initiate the study of open quantum field theories using holographic methods. Specifically, we consider a quantum field theory (the system) coupled to a holographic field theory at finite temperature (the environment). We investigate the effects of integrating out the holographic environment with an aim of obtaining an effective dynamics for the resulting open quantum field theory. The influence functionals which enter this open effective action are determined by the real-time (Schwinger-Keldysh) correlation functions of the holographic thermal environment. To evaluate the latter, we exploit recent developments, wherein the semiclassical gravitational Schwinger-Keldysh saddle geometries were identified as complexified black hole spacetimes. We compute real-time correlation functions using holographic methods in these geometries, and argue that they lead to a sensible open effective quantum dynamics for the system in question, a question that hitherto had been left unanswered. In addition to shedding light on open quantum systems coupled to strongly correlated thermal environments, our results also provide a principled computation of Schwinger-Keldysh observables in gravity and holography. In particular, these influence functionals we compute capture both the dissipative physics of black hole quasinormal modes, as well as that of the fluctuations encoded in outgoing Hawking quanta, and interactions between them. We obtain results for these observables at leading order in a low frequency and momentum expansion in general dimensions, in addition to determining explicit results for two dimensional holographic CFT environments.
The canonical operator quantisation formulation corresponding to the Klauder-Daubechies construction of the phase space path integral is considered. This formulation is explicitly applied and solved in the case of the harmonic oscillator, thereby illustrating in a manner complementary to Klauder and Daubechies original work some of the promising features offered by their construction of a quantum dynamics. The Klauder-Daubechies functional integral involves a regularisation parameter eventually taken to vanish, which defines a new physical time scale. When extrapolated to the field theory context, besides providing a new regularisation of short distance divergences, keeping a finite value for that time scale offers some tantalising prospects when it comes to strong gravitational quantum systems.
We consider the evolution of a quantum simple harmonic oscillator in a general Gaussian state under simultaneous time-continuous weak position and momentum measurements. We deduce the stochastic evolution equations for position and momentum expectation values and the covariance matrix elements from the systems characteristic function. By generalizing the Chantasri-Dressel-Jordan (CDJ) formalism (Chantasri et al.~2013 and 2015) to this continuous variable system, we construct its stochastic Hamiltonian and action. Action extremization gives us the equations for the most-likely readout paths and quantum trajectories. For steady states of the covariance matrix elements, the analytical solutions for these most-likely paths are obtained. Using the CDJ formalism we calculate final state probability densities exactly starting from any initial state. We also demonstrate the agreement between the optimal path solutions and the averages of simulated clustered stochastic trajectories. Our results provide insights into the time dependence of the mechanical energy of the system during the measurement process, motivating their importance for quantum measurement engine/refrigerator experiments.
We consider a thermal quantum harmonic oscillator weakly coupled to a heat bath at a different temperature. We analytically study the quantum heat exchange statistics between the two systems using the quantum-optical master equation. We exactly compute the characteristic function of the heat distribution and show that it verifies the Jarzynski-Wojcik fluctuation theorem. We further evaluate the heat probability density in the limit of long thermalization times, both in the low and high temperature regimes, and investigate its time evolution by calculating its first two cumulants.
A system obeying the harmonic oscillator equation of motion can be used as a force or proper acceleration sensor. In this short review we derive analytical expressions for the sensitivity of such sensors in a range of different situations, considering noise of thermal and measurement origins and a formalism for dealing with oscillators whose natural frequency $omega_0$ jitters. A special case where the sensitivity can be improved beyond the standard expressions and some applications with examples are also discussed.