Time evolution of a superposition of dressed oscillator states in a cavity

Abstract

Using the formalism of renormalized coordinates and dressed states introduced in previous publications, we perform a nonperturbative study of the time evolution of a superposition of two states, the ground state and the first excited level of a harmonic oscillator, the system being confined in a perfectly reflecting cavity of radius R. For R → ∞, we find dissipation with dominance of the interference terms of the density matrix, in both weak- and strong-coupling regimes. For small values of R all elements of the density matrix present an oscillatory behavior as time goes on and the system is not dissipative. In both cases, we obtain improved theoretical results with respect to those coming from perturbation theory.