Quantum Langevin equation

Abstract

We propose a Langevin equation to describe the quantum Brownian motion of bounded particles based on a distinctive formulation concerning both the fluctuation and dissipation forces. The fluctuation force is similar to that employed in the classical case. It is a white noise with a variance proportional to the temperature. The dissipation force is not restrict to be proportional to the velocity and is determined in a way as to guarantee that the stationary state is given by a density operator of the Gibbs canonical type. To this end we derived an equation that gives the time evolution of the density operator, which turns out to be a quantum Fokker-Planck-Kramers equation. The approach is applied to the harmonic oscillator in which case the dissipation force is found to be non Hermitian and proportional to the velocity and position.