Quantum Brownian motion in a magnetic field: Transition from monotonic to oscillatory behaviour

Urbashi Satpathi, Supurna Sinha

Published 2017-06-30Version 1

We investigate the Brownian motion of a charged particle in a magnetic field. We study this in the high temperature classical and low temperature quantum domains. In both domains, we observe a transition of the mean square displacement from a monotonic behaviour to a damped oscillatory behaviour as one increases the strength of the magnetic field. When the strength of the magnetic field is negligible, the mean square displacement grows linearly with time in the classical domain and logarithmically with time in the quantum domain. We notice that these features of the mean square displacement are robust and remain essentially the same for an Ohmic dissipation model and a single relaxation time model for the memory kernel. The predictions stemming from our analysis can be tested against experiments in trapped cold ions. In addition, the experiment proposed here can be used as a way of probing extremely small magnetic fields, thus opening up a new window in magnetometry.