Regular Article

An entropy production based method for determining the position diffusion’s coefficient of a quantum Brownian motion

¹ Department of Physics, University of Malta, Msida, MSD 2080, Malta
² Institut für Angewandte Physik, Technische Universität Darmstadt, 64289 Darmstadt, Germany
³ Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Eötvös Loránd University, ELTE, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/A, 1117 Budapest, Hungary
⁴ Institute for Solid State Physics and Optics, Wigner Research Centre, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 49, 1525 Budapest, Hungary

^a e-mail: zsolt.bernad@um.edu.mt

Received: 8 September 2018
Published online: 11 December 2018

Abstract

Quantum Brownian motion of a harmonic oscillator in the Markovian approximation is described by the respective Caldeira–Leggett master equation. This master equation can be brought into Lindblad form by adding a position diffusion term to it. The coefficient of this term is either customarily taken to be the lower bound dictated by the Dekker inequality or determined by more detailed derivations on the linearly damped quantum harmonic oscillator. In this paper, we explore the theoretical possibilities of determining the position diffusion term’s coefficient by analyzing the entropy production of the master equation.