Return to Colloquia & Seminar listing
Decoherence in the kinetic regime
ProbabilitySpeaker: | Riccardo Adami, University of Milano Bicocca |
Location: | 2112 MSB |
Start time: | Wed, Apr 1 2009, 4:10PM |
The dynamics of a system consisting of an electron and a phonon field is described by a Schroedinger equation on the tensor product of a bosonic Fock space with the space of the electron's wave functions. As initial state of the electron we choose the superposition of two spatially localized distant bumps moving towards each other. The phonons are initially a thermal state. We study the kinetic limit of the dynamics of the system, and show that the quantum interference between the two bumps decays exponentially in time, with a decay rate proportional to the total scattering cross section of the electron-phonon interaction. Such a phenomenon is called decoherence. The result was obtained in collaboration with L. Erdos (Munich).