This award supports Dr. Philip Pechukas and a graduate student from the Columbia University in a collaboration with Herman Grabert of the Department of Physics at the Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg. The collaboration brings together the complementary capabilities of the German and U.S. groups to study open systems that dissipate energy and momentum. While the classical theory of dissipative functions is highly developed, the theory of quantum dissipation is not well understood, especially in the presence of strong interactions with the surroundings. The present collaboration will answer many current questions in the field by studying a large class of generalized models of quantum dissipation. Both groups have demonstrated success in this area in the past, and the results of the present collaboration could be useful for many fields, including quantum cosmology, the foundations of observation theory, quantum computing, and modern optics.
