Related papers: Nonexponential decay of an unstable quantum system…
An effect generated by the nonexponential behavior of the survival amplitude of an unstable state in the long time region is considered. In 1957 Khalfin proved that this amplitude tends to zero as $t\to\infty$ more slowly than any…
In this paper we study the time evolution of the decay process for a particle confined initially in a finite region of space, extending our analysis given recently (Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 337 (1995)). For this purpose, we solve exactly the…
A study is made of the behavior of unstable states in simple models which nevertheless are realistic representations of situations occurring in nature. It is demonstrated that a non-exponential decay pattern will ultimately dominate decay…
We consider the phase transition of a string with tension $\eps_1$ to a string with a smaller tension $\eps_2$. The transition proceeds through quantum tunneling, and we calculate in arbitrary number of dimensions the pre-exponential factor…
The most unstable quantum states and elementary particles possess more than a single decay channel. At the same time, it is well known that typically the decay law is not simply exponential. Therefore, it is natural to ask how to spot the…
One of the paradigms of a small quantum system in a dissipative environment is the decay of an excited atom undergoing spontaneous photon emission into the fluctuating quantum electrodynamic vacuum. Recent experiments have demonstrated that…
The temporal behavior of quantum mechanical systems is reviewed. We study the so-called quantum Zeno effect, that arises from the quadratic short-time behavior, and the analytic properties of the ``survival" amplitude. It is shown that the…
Quantum systems lose coherence upon interaction with the environment and tend towards classical states. Quantum coherence is known to exponentially decay in time so that macroscopic quantum superpositions are generally unsustainable. In…
Each scheme of state reconstruction comes down to parametrize the state of a quantum system by expectation values or probabilities directly measurable in an experiment. It is argued that the time evolution of these quantities provides an…
The survival probability of a quantum system with a finite ground energy is known to decay subexponentially at large times. Here we show that, under the same assumption, the average value of any quantum observable, whenever well-defined,…
In this paper we demonstrate that the inevitable action of the environment can be substantially weakened when considering appropriate nonstationary quantum systems. Beyond protecting quantum states against decoherence, an oscillating…
We present a quantum field theoretical derivation of the nondecay probability of an unstable particle with nonzero three-momentum $\mathbf{p}$. To this end, we use the (fully resummed) propagator of the unstable particle, denoted as $S,$ to…
We prove local and global energy decay for the asymptotically periodic damped wave equation on the Euclidean space. Since the behavior of high frequencies is already mostly understood, this paper is mainly about the contribution of low…
This paper explores the exponential stability of two nonlinear wave equations coupled through their velocities. The analysis is divided into two main cases. First, we consider a system where one equation is damped, while the other…
The simple stationary decoherence of a two-state quantum system is discussed from a new viewpoint of environmental entanglement. My work emphasizes that an unconditional local state must totally be disentangled from the rest of the…
Radioactive decay of an unstable isotope is widely believed to be exponential. This view is supported by experiments on rapidly decaying isotopes but is more difficult to verify for slowly decaying isotopes. The decay of 14C can be…
We determine the late-time dynamics of a generic spin ensemble with inhomogeneous broadening - equivalently, qubits with arbitrary Zeeman splittings - coupled to a dissipative environment with strength decreasing as $1/t$. The approach to…
We describe our recent results on the resonant perturbation theory of decoherence and relaxation for quantum system with many qubits. The approach represents a rigorous analysis of the phenomenon of decoherence and relaxation for general…
We report the first observation of the Quantum Zeno and Anti-Zeno effects in an unstable system. Cold sodium atoms are trapped in a far-detuned standing wave of light that is accelerated for a controlled duration. For a large acceleration…
We study the elusive transition from exponential to post-exponential (algebraic) decay of the probability density of a quantum particle emitted by an exponentially decaying source, in one dimension. The main finding is that the probability…