Starting from first principles, this book introduces the fundamental concepts and methods of dissipative quantum mechanics and explores related phenomena in condensed matter systems. Major experimental achievements in cooperation with theoretical advances have brightened the field and brought it to the attention of the general community in natural sciences. Nowadays, working knowledge of dissipative quantum mechanics is an essential tool for many physicists. This book -- originally published in 1990 and republished in 1999 and and 2008 as enlarged second and third editions -- delves significantly deeper than ever before into the fundamental concepts, methods and applications of quantum dissipative systems.This fourth edition provides a self-contained and updated account of the quantum mechanics of open systems and offers important new material including the most recent developments. The subject matter has been expanded by about fifteen percent. Many chapters have been completely rewritten to better cater to both the needs of newcomers to the field and the requests of the advanced readership. Two chapters have been added that account for recent progress in the field. This book should be accessible to all graduate students in physics. Researchers will find this a rich and stimulating source.

Recent advances in the quantum theory of macroscopic systems have brightened up the field and brought it into the focus of a general community in natural sciences. The fundamental concepts, methods and applications including the most recent developments, previously covered for the most part only in the original literature, are presented here in a comprehensive treatment to an audience who is reasonably familiar with quantum-statistical mechanics and has had rudimentary contacts with the path integral formulation.This book deals with the phenomena and theory of decoherence and dissipation in quantum mechanics that arise from the interaction with the environment. A general path integral description of equilibrium thermodynamics and non-equilibrium dynamics is developed. The approach can deal with weak and strong dissipation, and with all kinds of memory effects. Applications to numerous phenomenological and microscopic systems are presented, where emphasis is put on condensed matter and chemical physics. The basic principles and methods of preparation functions, propagating functions, and time correlation functions are described. Special attention is focused on quantum tunneling and quantum coherence phenomena of macroscopic variables. Many illustrative realistic examples are discussed in some detail. The book attempts to provide a broad perspective and to open up this rapidly developing field to interested researchers normally working in different fields.In this enlarged second edition, the nineteen chapters of the first edition have been expanded by about one-third to better meet both the requests of newcomers to the field and of advanced readers, and seven new chapters have been added that review the most recent important developments.

Dissipative forces play an important role in problems of classical as well as quantum mechanics. Since these forces are not among the basic forces of nature, it is essential to consider whether they should be treated as phenomenological interactions used in the equations of motion, or they should be derived from other conservative forces. In this book we discuss both approaches in detail starting with the Stoke's law of motion in a viscous fluid and ending with a rather detailed review of the recent attempts to understand the nature of the drag forces originating from the motion of a plane or a sphere in vacuum caused by the variations in the zero-point energy. In the classical formulation, mathematical techniques for construction of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian for the variational formulation of non-conservative systems are discussed at length. Various physical systems of interest including the problem of radiating electron, theory of natural line width, spin-boson problem, scattering and trapping of heavy ions and optical potential models of nuclear reactions are considered and solved.

Spontaneous pattern formation in nonlinear dissipative systems far from equilibrium occurs in a variety of settings in nature and technology, and has applications ranging from nonlinear optics through solid and fluid mechanics, physical chemistry and chemical engineering to biology. This book explores the forefront of current research, describing in-depth the analytical methods that elucidate the complex evolution of nonlinear dissipative systems.

This classic text provides an excellent introduction to a new and rapidly developing field of research. Now well established as a textbook in this rapidly developing field of research, the new edition is much enlarged and covers a host of new results.

A reference and text, Dissipative Phenomena treats the broadly applicable area of nonequilibrium statistical physics and concentrates the modelling and characterization of dissipative phenomena. A variety of examples from diverse disciplines, such as condensed matter physics, materials science, metallurgy, chemical physics, are discussed. Dattagupta employs a broad framework of stochastic processes and master equation techniques to obtain models for a range of experimentally relevant phenomena such as classical and quantum Brownian motion, spin dynamics, kinetics of phase ordering, relaxation in glasses, and dissipative tunnelling. This book will serve as a graduate/research level textbook since it offers considerable utility to experimentalists, computational physicists and theorists.

The present book provides a unified and general framework for studying quantum and classical dynamical systems, both finite and infinite, conservative and dissipative. Special attention is paid to the use of statistical and geometrical techniques, such as multitime correlation functions,quantum dynamical entropy, and non-commutative Lyapunov exponents, for systems with a complex evolution. The material is presented in a concise but self-contained and mathematically friendly way. The main ideas are introduced and illustrated by numerous examples which are directly connected to therelevant physics. Suggestions for further reading are included at the end of each chapter. The book addresses graduate students both in physics and mathematics with interests in mathematical aspects of quantum physics and applications of ergodic theory, operator algebras and statistics to physics,but without any prior knowledge of these subjects.