Macroscopic tunelling, decoherence and noise induced activation

PAULA I. VILLAR

Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, Italia

Workshop; International Workshop on Quantum Phenomena and Information: From atomic to Mesoscopic Physics; 2008

Herein, we describe the evolution of a Brownian quantum system coupled to a general ohmic environment, at strictly zero temperature, in terms of two main environmental induced physical phenomena: decoherence and energy-activation. We show that the latter is a post-decoherence phenomenon. In the end, we describe the evolution of a quantum particle coupled to a double well potential in terms of three main physical phenomena, namely decoherence, quantum tunneling and noise-induced activation We show that the decoherence inhibits tunneling, even though in the end, the particle may be found in the other minima of the potential well.