Rate of decoherence for an electron weakly coupled to a phonon gas
Mathematical Physics
2009-11-13 v1 math.MP
Abstract
We study the dynamics of an electron weakly coupled to a phonon gas. The initial state of the electron is the superposition of two spatially localized distant bumps moving towards each other, and the phonons are in a thermal state. We investigate the dynamics of the system in the kinetic regime and show that the time evolution makes the non-diagonal terms of the density matrix of the electron decay, destroying the interference between the two bumps. We show that such a damping effect is exponential in time, and the related decay rate is proportional to the total scattering cross section of the electron-phonon interaction.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0802.1229,
title = {Rate of decoherence for an electron weakly coupled to a phonon gas},
author = {Riccardo Adami and Laszlo Erdos},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0802.1229},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
27 pages, 2 figures