Decoherence of molecular wave packets in an anharmonic potential

Abstract

The time evolution of anharmonic molecular wave packets is investigated under the influence of the environment consisting of harmonic oscillators. These oscillators represent photon or phonon modes and assumed to be in thermal equilibrium. Our model explicitly incorporates the fact that in the case of a nonequidistant spectrum the rates of the environment induced transitions are different for each transition. The nonunitary time evolution is visualized by the aid of the Wigner function related to the vibrational state of the molecule. The time scale of decoherence is much shorter than that of dissipation, and gives rise to states which are mixtures of localized states along the phase space orbit of the corresponding classical particle. This behavior is to a large extent independent of the coupling strength, the temperature of the environment and also of the initial state.

7 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Rapid and slow decoherence in conjunction with dissipation in a system of two-level atoms
• Time evolution in the Morse potential using supersymmetry: dissociation of the NO molecule

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Temperature effects on a network of dissipative quantum harmonic oscillators: collective damping and diffusion processes
• Diatomic molecule in a strong infrared laser field: level-shifts and bond-length change due to laser-dressed Morse potential
• Quantum dissipative systems beyond the standard harmonic model: features of linear absorption and dynamics
• Effect of dissipative environment on collapses and revivals of a nonlinear quantum oscillator
• Estimation of the spatial decoherence time in circular quantum dots