A no-go result for the quantum damped harmonic oscillator

Publication date: Available online 14 June 2019Source: Physics Letters AAuthor(s): F. Bagarello, F. Gargano, F. RoccatiAbstractIn this letter we show that it is not possible to set up a canonical quantization for the damped harmonic oscillator using the Bateman lagrangian. In particular, we prove that no square integrable vacuum exists for the natural ladder operators of the system, and that the only vacua can be found as distributions. This implies that the procedure proposed by some authors is only formally correct, and requires a much deeper analysis to be made rigorous.

Source: Physics Letters A - June 15, 2019 Category: Physics Source Type: research