Spontaneous decoherence of coupled harmonic oscillators confined in a ring

• 来源期刊: 中国科学:物理学 力学 天文学（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2018,（4）
• 页码范围: 17-29
• 页数: 13页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

We study the spontaneous decoherence of coupled harmonic oscillators confined in a ring container,where the nearest-neighbor harmonic potentials are taken into consideration.Without any external symmetry-breaking field or surrounding environment,the quantum superposition state prepared in the relative degrees of freedom gradually loses its quantum coherence spontaneously.This spontaneous decoherence is interpreted by the gauge couplings between the center-of-mass and the relative degrees of freedoms,which actually originate from the symmetries of the ring geometry and the corresponding nontrivial boundary conditions.In particular,such spontaneous decoherence does not occur at all at the thermodynamic limit because the nontrivial boundary conditions become the trivial Born-von Karman boundary conditions when the perimeter of the ring container tends to infinity.Our investigation shows that a thermal macroscopic object with certain symmetries has a chance for its quantum properties to degrade even without applying an external symmetry-breaking field or surrounding environment.