On the zero temperature limit of the Kubo-transformed quantum time correlation function

Abstract

The zero temperature limit of several quantum time correlation functions is analysed. It is shown that while the canonical quantum time correlation function retains the full dynamical information as temperature approaches zero, the Kubo-transformed and the thermally symmetrised quantum time correlation functions lose all dynamical information at this limit. This is shown to be a consequence of the projection onto the ground state, via the limiting process of the quantities and , either together as a product, or separately. Although these findings would seem to suggest that finite-temperature methods commonly used to estimate Kubo correlation functions would be incapable of retaining any ground state dynamics, we propose a route for recovering in principle all dynamical information at the ground state. It is first shown that the usual frequency space relation between canonical and Kubo correlation functions also holds for microcanonical time correlation functions. Since the Kubo-transformed microcanonical correlation function can be obtained from the usual finite-temperature function by including a projection onto the corresponding microcanonical ensemble, finite-temperature methods, properly modified to incorporate such a constraint, can be used to capture full quantum dynamics at any arbitrary energy state, including the ground state. This approach is illustrated with the application of centroid dynamics to the ground state dynamics of the harmonic oscillator.