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Concept
Open quantum system
Summary
In physics, an open quantum system is a quantum-mechanical system that interacts with an external quantum system, which is known as the environment or a bath. In general, these interactions significantly change the dynamics of the system and result in quantum dissipation, such that the information contained in the system is lost to its environment. Because no quantum system is completely isolated from its surroundings, it is important to develop a theoretical framework for treating these interactions in order to obtain an accurate understanding of quantum systems.
Techniques developed in the context of open quantum systems have proven powerful in fields such as quantum optics, quantum measurement theory, quantum statistical mechanics, quantum information science, quantum thermodynamics, quantum cosmology, quantum biology, and semi-classical approximations.
A complete description of a quantum system requires the inclusion of the environment. Completely describing the resulting combined system then requires the inclusion of its environment, which results in a new system that can only be completely described if its environment is included and so on. The eventual outcome of this process of embedding is the state of the whole universe described by a wavefunction . The fact that every quantum system has some degree of openness also means that no quantum system can ever be in a pure state. A pure state is unitary equivalent to a zero-temperature ground state, forbidden by the third law of thermodynamics.
Even if the combined system is in a pure state and can be described by a wavefunction , a subsystem in general cannot be described by a wavefunction. This observation motivated the formalism of density matrices, or density operators, introduced by John von Neumann in 1927 and independently, but less systematically by Lev Landau in 1927 and Felix Bloch in 1946. In general, the state of a subsystem is described by the density operator and the expectation value of an observable by the scalar product .
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