The HADES seminar on Tuesday, September 12th will be at 3:30pm in Room 740.

Speaker: Zhen Huang

Abstract: The goal of this talk is to introduce the topic of semi-classical analysis of open quantum systems to the audience.
Semi-classical analysis of closed quantum systems is a very well-established topic (for example, see Zworski’s book). However, rigorous analytical studies of open quantum systems in the semi-classical regimes are rarely done so far. This is partly because open quantum dynamics often do not have properties as nice as Schrodinger equations. The lack of analytic results also hinders the design and analysis of numerical algorithms.
Quantum-classical correspondence in the Schrodinger equation is well known to hold for O(log(1/h)) time scale (h is the non-dimensionalized Planck constant). We will discuss a very recent work that addresses the quantum-classical correspondence for the simplest open quantum system model (which is still complicated), i.e. Lindblad dynamics. We present a rigorous proof that a classical description is valid for O(1/sqrt(h)) time, which is much longer than the Ehrenfest timescale. We will also discuss several open questions along this line, and possible generalizations to more complicated open quantum systems.