0000000000034602
AUTHOR
Matthias Mück
CONSTRUCTION OF METASTABLE STATES IN QUANTUM ELECTRODYNAMICS
In this paper, we construct metastable states of atoms interacting with the quantized radiation field. These states emerge from the excited bound states of the non-interacting system. We prove that these states obey an exponential time-decay law. In detail, we show that their decay is given by an exponential function in time, predicted by Fermi's Golden Rule, plus a small remainder term. The latter is proportional to the (4+β)th power of the coupling constant and decays algebraically in time. As a result, though it is small, it dominates the decay for large times. A central point of the paper is that our remainder term is significantly smaller than the one previously obtained in [1] and as…
Instability of Equilibrium States for Coupled Heat Reservoirs at Different Temperatures
Abstract We consider quantum systems consisting of a “small” system coupled to two reservoirs (called open systems). We show that such systems have no equilibrium states normal with respect to any state of the decoupled system in which the reservoirs are at different temperatures, provided that either the temperatures or the temperature difference divided by the product of the temperatures are not too small. Our proof involves an elaborate spectral analysis of a general class of generators of the dynamics of open quantum systems, including quantum Liouville operators (“positive temperature Hamiltonians”) which generate the dynamics of the systems under consideration.