Temperature of a Decoherent Oscillator with Strong Coupling

Abstract

The temperature of an oscillator coupled to the vacuum state of a heat bath via ohmic coupling is non-zero, as measured by the reduced density matrix of the oscillator. This paper shows that the actual temperature, as measured by a thermometer is still zero (or in the thermal state of the bath, the temperature of the bath). The decoherence temperature is due to "false-decoherence", with the heat bath state being dragged along with the oscillator.

6 pages

References in corpus (2)

• Backreaction and Unruh effect: New insights from exact solutions of uniformly accelerated detectors
• Non-Equilibrium Fluctuation-Dissipation Inequality and Non-Equilibrium Uncertainty Principle