Motion of heavy particles coupled to fermionic and bosonic environments in one dimension

Abstract

Making use of a simple unitary transformation we change the hamiltonian of a particle coupled to an one dimensional gas of bosons or fermions to a new form from which the many body degrees of freedom can be easily traced out. The effective dynamics of the particle allows us to compute its damping constant in terms of the reflection coefficient of the interaction potential and the occupation number of the environmental particles. We apply our results to a delta repulsive potential.