Decoherence, friction, and thermalization of quantum rigid rotors

Talk

A nanoscale quantum rigid rotor moving and revolving in a thin gas experiences random collisions with the surrounding gas atoms, which lead to decoherence and eventually to thermalization of the body. Depending on how its rotation rate compares to the mean duration of the scattering processes, the collisions might either decohere superpositions of rigid body orientations or of angular momentum states. I will present the general Markovian theory of classical and quantum rotational friction, diffusion, thermalization, and decoherence of arbitrarily shaped rigid bodies [1,2] and compare the resulting decoherence rates to recent experiments with nitrogen superrotors [3,4]. [1] Stickler, Schrinski, Hornberger, Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 040401 (2018) [2] Martinetz, Hornberger, Stickler, Phys. Rev. E 97, 052112 (2018) [3] Milner, Korobenko, Hepburn, Milner, Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 043005 (2014) [4] Stickler, Taher Ghahramani, Hornberger, Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 243402 (2018)

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