Symmetry and its breaking in path integral approach to quantum Brownian motion

TL;DR

This paper explores the symmetry properties of the path integral formulation of quantum Brownian motion, deriving a quantum Jarzynski-like equality and connecting it to classical fluctuation theorems through symmetry analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a complex time contour approach in the path integral formalism to analyze symmetry breaking and fluctuation relations in open quantum systems.

Findings

Symmetry invariance in equilibrium leads to fluctuation-dissipation relations.

External driving breaks symmetry, enabling derivation of a quantum Jarzynski-like equality.

Classical limit recovers known fluctuation theorems from the quantum symmetry framework.

Abstract

We study the Caldeira-Leggett model where a quantum Brownian particle interacts with an environment or a bath consisting of a collection of harmonic oscillators in the path integral formalism. Compared to the contours that the paths take in the conventional Schwinger-Keldysh formalism, the paths in our study are deformed in the complex time plane as suggested by the recent study [C. Aron, G. Biroli and L. F. Cugliandolo, SciPost Phys.\ {\bf 4}, 008 (2018)]. This is done to investigate the connection between the symmetry properties in the Schwinger-Keldysh action and the equilibrium or non-equilibrium nature of the dynamics in an open quantum system. We derive the influence functional explicitly in this setting, which captures the effect of the coupling to the bath. We show that in equilibrium the action and the influence functional are invariant under a set of transformations of path integral variables. The fluctuation-dissipation relation is obtained as a consequence of this symmetry. When the system is driven by an external time-dependent protocol, the symmetry is broken. From the terms that break the symmetry, we derive a quantum Jarzynski-like equality for quantum mechanical work given as a function of fluctuating quantum trajectory. In the classical limit, the transformations becomes those used in the functional integral formalism of the classical stochastic thermodynamics to derive the classical fluctuation theorem.