Quantum mechanics of damped systems

D. Chruscinski

Published 2003-01-17, updated 2003-07-14Version 3

We show that the quantization of a simple damped system leads to a self-adjoint Hamiltonian with a family of complex generalized eigenvalues. It turns out that they correspond to the poles of energy eigenvectors when continued to the complex energy plane. Therefore, the corresponding generalized eigenvectors may be interpreted as resonant states. We show that resonant states are responsible for the irreversible quantum dynamics of our simple model.