dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaPath integrals and wavepacket evolution for damped mechanical systems
| Authors | Dharmesh Jain, A. Das, Sayan Kar |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | quant-ph/0611239 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0611239 |
| DOI | 10.1119/1.2423040 |
| Journal | AJP 75 (2007) 259 |
Abstract
Damped mechanical systems with various forms of damping are quantized using the path integral formalism. In particular, we obtain the path integral kernel for the linearly damped harmonic oscillator and a particle in a uniform gravitational field with linearly or quadratically damped motion. In each case, we study the evolution of Gaussian wavepackets and discuss the characteristic features that help us distinguish between different types of damping. For quadratic damping, we show that the action and equation of motion of such a system has a connection with the zero dimensional version of a currently popular scalar field theory. Furthermore we demonstrate that the equation of motion (for quadratic damping) can be identified as a geodesic equation in a fictitious two-dimensional space.
{
"annotation_id": "95ff11f6-a49e-4651-b20d-5cee7f260f86",
"date_created": "2026-03-02T18:02:33.453000Z",
"date_modified": "2026-03-02T18:02:33.453000Z",
"file_hash": "6597ea3008b2448988b61f5946fef04980c6f0968ebbd90ca31fa17e32a950fb",
"private": false,
"record": {
"abstract": "Damped mechanical systems with various forms of damping are quantized using\nthe path integral formalism. In particular, we obtain the path integral kernel\nfor the linearly damped harmonic oscillator and a particle in a uniform\ngravitational field with linearly or quadratically damped motion. In each case,\nwe study the evolution of Gaussian wavepackets and discuss the characteristic\nfeatures that help us distinguish between different types of damping. For\nquadratic damping, we show that the action and equation of motion of such a\nsystem has a connection with the zero dimensional version of a currently\npopular scalar field theory. Furthermore we demonstrate that the equation of\nmotion (for quadratic damping) can be identified as a geodesic equation in a\nfictitious two-dimensional space.",
"arxiv_id": "quant-ph/0611239",
"authors": [
"Dharmesh Jain",
"A. Das",
"Sayan Kar"
],
"categories": [
"quant-ph"
],
"doi": "10.1119/1.2423040",
"journal_ref": "AJP 75 (2007) 259",
"title": "Path integrals and wavepacket evolution for damped mechanical systems",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0611239"
},
"schema_id": "dorsal/arxiv",
"source": {
"execution_id": "2e629dcd-2810-4363-90fc-828ea7e9353a",
"id": "arXiv Dataset IDs",
"type": "Model",
"variant": "snapshot-2026-03-01",
"version": "0.1.0"
},
"user_id": 1000002
}