We consider the global thermal state of classical and quantum harmonic
oscillators that interact with a reservoir. Ohmic damping of the oscillator can
be exactly treated with a 1D scalar field reservoir, whereas general non-Ohmic
damping is conveniently treated with a continuum reservoir of harmonic
oscillators. Using the diagonalized Hamiltonian of the total system, we
calculate a number of thermodynamic quantities for the damped oscillator: the
mean force internal energy, mean force free energy, and another internal energy
based on the free-oscillator Hamiltonian. The classical mean force energy is
equal to that of a free oscillator, for both Ohmic and non-Ohmic damping and no
matter how strong the coupling to the reservoir. In contrast, the quantum mean
force energy depends on the details of the damping and diverges for strictly
Ohmic damping. These results give additional insight into the steady-state
thermodynamics of open systems with arbitrarily strong coupling to a reservoir,
complementing results for energies derived within dynamical approaches (e.g.
master equations) in the weak-coupling regime.Comment: 13 page
