Kinetic description of quantum Brownian motion

Bassano Vacchini, Francesco Petruccione

Published 2008-09-03Version 1

We stress the relevance of the two features of translational invariance and atomic nature of the gas in the quantum description of the motion of a massive test particle in a gas, corresponding to the original picture of Einstein used in the characterization of Brownian motion. The master equation describing the reduced dynamics of the test particle is of Lindblad form and complies with the requirement of covariance under translations.