Dynamical breakdown of time reversal invariance and causality

Abstract

Irreversibility and acausality of a sub-system are established in exactly soluble harmonic models with reversible and causal dynamics. It is shown that initial conditions, imposed on some dynamical degrees of freedom may break time reversal invariance for other degrees of freedom. This happens if observations carried out in any large but finite amount of time can not resolve the spectrum of the eliminated degrees of freedom, namely when the spectrum has a condensation point at the ground state. Acausality follows due to the dominance of the dynamics by almost time-independent modes.

16 pg., 3 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. D

References in corpus (2)

• Quantum-classical crossover in electrodynamics
• Sub-classical fields and polarization in electrodynamics

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Classical and quantum effective theories
• Dynamics of the electric current in an ideal electron gas: a sound mode inside the quasi-particles
• Effective dynamics of a classical point charge
• Environment Induced Time Arrow and the Closed Time Path method
• On the modeling of irreversibility by relaxator Liouville dynamics
• Spontaneous breakdown of the time reversal symmetry