Anomalies in Strongly Coupled Harmonic Quantum Brownian Motion

Abstract

The exact dynamics of a quantum damped harmonic oscillator coupled to a reservoir of boson modes has been formally described in terms of the coupling function, both in weak and strong coupling regime. In this scenario, we provide a further description of the exact dynamics through integral transforms. We focus on a special class of spectral densities, sub-ohmic at low frequencies, and including integrable divergencies referred to as photonic band gaps. The Drude form of the spectral densities is recovered as upper limit. Starting from special distributions of coherent states as external reservoir, the exact time evolution, described through Fox H-functions, shows long time inverse power law decays, departing from the exponential-like relaxations obtained for the Drude model. Different from the weak coupling regime, in the sub-ohmic condition, undamped oscillations plus inverse power law relaxations appear in the long time evolution of the observables position and momentum. Under the same condition, the number of excitations shows trapping of the population of the excited levels and oscillations enveloped in inverse power law relaxations. Similarly to the weak coupling regime, critical configurations give arbitrarily slow relaxations useful for the control of the dynamics. If compared to the value obtained in weak coupling condition, for strong couplings the critical frequency is enhanced by a factor 4.