Positive Hamiltonians cannot give exponential decay of positive observables

Abstract

The survival probability of a quantum system with a finite ground energy is known to decay subexponentially at large times. Here we show that, under the same assumption, the average value of any quantum observable, whenever well-defined, cannot converge exponentially to an extremal value of the spectrum of the observable. Large-time deviations from the exponential decay are therefore a general feature of quantum systems. As a simple application of these results, we show that, when considering an open quantum system whose dynamics is generated by a Hamiltonian with a finite ground energy, a large-time exponential decay of populations is forbidden, whereas coherences may still decay exponentially.