Decoherence and Brownian motion of a polarizable particle near a surface
Abstract
We analyze the classical and quantized center-of-mass motion of a polarizable particle interacting with the fluctuations of the electromagnetic (EM) field in the presence of a medium. As a polarizable particle is immersed in a thermal environment, the momentum impulses imparted by the field fluctuations lead to momentum diffusion and drag for the particle's classical center of mass. When considering the quantized center-of-mass motion of the particle, these very fluctuations gain information about its position, leading to decoherence in the position basis. We derive a position localization master equation for the particle's quantized center of mass, and examine its classical center-of-mass momentum diffusion, elucidating correspondences between classical and quantum Brownian motion of polarizable particles near media.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2408.15433,
title = {Decoherence and Brownian motion of a polarizable particle near a surface},
author = {Clemens Jakubec and Christopher Jarzynski and Kanu Sinha},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.15433},
year = {2024}
}