Applications of Unitary Integration
to Interacting and Dissipative Systems*

W. F. Buell and B. A. Shadwick

Unitary integration is a numerical method that preserves the structure of the quantum Liouville equation by evolving the density matrix r via Unitary integration is a numerical method that preserves the structure of the quantum Liouville equation by evolving the density matrix r via unitary transformations. Unitary integrators preserve the kinematic invariants cj = Trrj, j = 1,..., n to all orders in the time step. Here we extend our previous work to interacting systems and to dissipative systems. We take as our prototypical interacting system a two-level atom interacting with a single mode of the quantized electromagnetic field. We approach dissipative quantum systems by adding a dissipative term -Lr to the density matrix equation and applying the technique of operator splitting. We use a unitary integrator for the Hamiltonian evolution and a conventional integrator for the dissipative piece. In this way we guarantee that all dissipation and decoherence (variation of the cj) is due to the new non-Hamiltonian terms, and not to any numerical artifacts.


*Supported by The Institute for Advanced Physics.

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