Quantum Angular Momentum Diffusion of Rigid Bodies
Quantum Physics
2017-12-18 v1
Abstract
We show how to describe the diffusion of the quantized angular momentum vector of an arbitrarily shaped rigid rotor as induced by its collisional interaction with an environment. We present the general form of the Lindblad-type master equation and relate it to the orientational decoherence of an asymmetric nanoparticle in the limit of small anisotropies. The corresponding diffusion coefficients are derived for gas particles scattering off large molecules and for ambient photons scattering off dielectric particles, using the elastic scattering amplitudes.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1712.05596,
title = {Quantum Angular Momentum Diffusion of Rigid Bodies},
author = {Birthe Papendell and Benjamin A. Stickler and Klaus Hornberger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.05596},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
18 pages, 1 figure; corresponds to published version