Quantum Environments: Spin Baths, Oscillator Baths, and applications to Quantum Magnetism

The low-energy physics of systems coupled to their surroundings is understood by truncating to effective Hamiltonians; these tend to reduce to a few canonical forms, involving coupling to "baths" of oscillators or spins. The method for doing this is demonstrated using examples from magnetism, superconductivity, and measurement theory, as is the way one then solves for the low-energy dynamics. Finally, detailed application is given to the exciting recent Quantum relaxation and tunneling work in naomagnets.Comment: Chapter in "Tunneling in Complex Systems" (World Sci., edited T. Tomsovic); 97 pages. Published in June 199

Creating Shared Value: A How-to Guide for the New Corporate (R)evolution

Creating Shared Value (CSV) requires comprehensive and sustained efforts across a corporation. Drawing heavily on real-life examples, this report identifies ten key building blocks that together form a blueprint for translating CSV into action, and explores how companies can get started on that process

Theory of the spin bath

The quantum dynamics of mesoscopic or macroscopic systems is always complicated by their coupling to many "environmental" modes.At low T these environmental effects are dominated by localised modes, such as nuclear and paramagnetic spins, and defects (which also dominate the entropy and specific heat). This environment, at low energies, maps onto a "spin bath" model. This contrasts with "oscillator bath" models (originated by Feynman and Vernon) which describe {\it delocalised} environmental modes such as electrons, phonons, photons, magnons, etc. One cannot in general map a spin bath to an oscillator bath (or vice-versa); they constitute distinct "universality classes" of quantum environment. We show how the mapping to spin bath models is made, and then discuss several examples in detail, including moving particles, magnetic solitons, nanomagnets, and SQUIDs, coupled to nuclear and paramagnetic spin environments. We show how to average over spin bath modes, using an operator instanton technique, to find the system dynamics, and give analytic results for the correlation functions, under various conditions. We then describe the application of this theory to magnetic and superconducting systems.Particular attention is given to recent work on tunneling magnetic macromolecules, where the role of the nuclear spin bath in controlling the tunneling is very clear; we also discuss other magnetic systems in the quantum regime, and the influence of nuclear and paramagnetic spins on flux dynamics in SQUIDs.Comment: Invited article for Rep. Prog. Phys. to appear in April, 2000 (41 pages, latex, 13 figures. This is a strongly revised and extended version of previous preprint cond-mat/9511011

Dynamics of a Pair of Interacting Spins Coupled to an Environmental Sea

We solve for the dynamics of a pair of spins, coupled to each other and also to an environmental sea of oscillators. The environment mediates an indirect interaction between the spins, causing both mutual coherence effects and dissipation. This model describes a wide variety of physical systems, ranging from 2 coupled microscopic systems (eg., magnetic impurities, bromophores, etc), to 2 coupled macroscopic quantum systems. We obtain analytic results for 3 regimes, viz., (i) The locked regime, where the 2 spins lock together; (ii) The correlated relaxation regime (mutually correlated incoherent relaxation); and (iii) The mutual coherence regime, with correlated damped oscillations. These results cover most of the parameter space of the system.Comment: 49 pages, To appear in Int J. Mod. Phys.

Master\u27s Recital

List of performers and performances