Subvacuum effects of the quantum field on the dynamics of a test particle (Q765795)

The authors present a study of the subvacuum effects of the quantized electromagnetic field: they explore the effects of an electromagnetic squeezed vacuum on the dynamics of the charged particle. The charged particle is considered as the system of interest and the degrees of freedom of the fields as the environment. Within the context of the closed-time-path formalism, the authors obtain the influence functional that encodes all effects from the fields upon the particle. The influence of the electromagnetic field fluctuations is expected to give an additional effect to the dynamics of the particle. Since the charged particle is never observed without being affected by the electromagnetic zero-point fluctuations, the observed velocity dispersion should already include the additional effect due to normal vacuum fluctuations. Thus, they define the renormalized velocity dispersion of the free particle by absorbing the normal vacuum contributions into the intrinsic velocity dispersion due to the finite wavepacket size. Then, they investigate how this renormalized velocity dispersion can be possibly reduced by the squeezed vacuum fluctuations so that it is smaller than its counterpart in normal vacuum fluctuations of the fields. This leads to the subvacuum phenomenon. For a more detailed analysis of the subvacuum phenomena, they incorporate the switching function, as a consequence of the finite-time switching-on/off process of interaction between the charged particle and electromagnetic squeezed modes. Firstly, they consider a sudden switching-on process, and then generalize the switching process to the case with a finite switching time by introducing a suitable switching function. They are able to derive an inequality associated with this subvacuum phenomenon. It turns out that the center of a wavepacket undergoes a non-inertial motion, where the electromagnetic self-force gives rise to a weak damping effect on the evolution of the trajectory. This paper is divided into four sections and three appendixes. After the introduction explaining the authors' motivation, in Section 2, the authors give a brief introduction of the closed-time-path formalism in order to describe the evolution of the reduced density matrix of a nonrelativistic charged particle coupling to the squeezed vacuum state. Section 3 gives a study of both the analytical and numerical full-time evolution. Section 4 summarizes the paper. In the appendixes, derivations of some important equations are given.