English

A no-go result for the quantum damped harmonic oscillator

Quantum Physics 2019-09-04 v2

Abstract

In this letter we show that it is not possible to set up a canonical quantization for the damped harmonic oscillator using the Bateman lagrangian. In particular, we prove that no square integrable vacuum exists for the {\em natural} ladder operators of the system, and that the only vacua can be found as distributions. This implies that the procedure proposed by some authors is only formally correct, and requires a much deeper analysis to be made rigorous.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1906.05121,
  title  = {A no-go result for the quantum damped harmonic oscillator},
  author = {Fabio Bagarello and Francesco Gargano and Federico Roccati},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.05121},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:51:32.486Z