Adiabatic elimination and Wigner function approach in microscopic derivation of open quantum Brownian motion

Abstract

Open quantum Brownian motion (OQBM) represents a new class of quantum Brownian motion where the dynamics of the Brownian particle depend not only on the interactions with a thermal environment but also on the state of the internal degrees of freedom. For an Ohmic bath spectral density with a Lorentz-Drude cutoff frequency at a high-temperature limit, we derive the BornMarkov master equation for the reduced density matrix of an open Brownian particle in a harmonic potential. The resulting master equation is written in phase-space representation using the Wigner function, and due to the separation of associated timescales in the high-damping limit, we perform adiabatic elimination of the momentum variable to obtain OQBM. We numerically solve the derived master equation for the reduced density matrix of the OQBM for Gaussian and non-Gaussian initial distributions. In each case, the OQBM dynamics converge to several Gaussian distributions. To gain physical insight into the studied system, we also plotted the dynamics of the off-diagonal element of the open quantum Brownian particle and found damped coherent oscillations. Finally, we investigated the time-dependent variance in the position of the OQBM walker and observed a transition between ballistic and diffusive behavior.