%A Michael Zwolak
%O ?2008 American Institute of Physics. 

Received 28 May 2008; accepted 5 August 2008; published 8 September 2008. 

We thank W. Zurek, G. Refael, G. Smith, F. M. Cucchietti, and P. Milonni for helpful comments. This research was supported in part by a Gordon and Betty Moore Fellowship at Caltech and by the U.S. Department of Energy through the LANL/LDRD Program.
%J Journal of Chemical Physics
%T Finite representations of continuum environments
%X Understanding dissipative and decohering processes is fundamental to the study of quantum systems. An accurate and generic method for investigating these processes is to simulate both the system and environment, which, however, is computationally very demanding. We develop a novel approach to constructing finite representations of the environment based on the influence of different frequency scales on the system's dynamics. As an illustration, we analyze a solvable model of an optical mode decaying into a reservoir. The influence of the environment modes is constant for small frequencies, but drops off rapidly for large frequencies, allowing for a very sparse representation at high frequencies that gives a significant computational speedup in simulating the environment. This approach provides a general framework for simulating open quantum systems.
%N 10
%K environmental factors, quantum theory
%P Art. No. 101101
%V 129
%D 2008
%I American Institute of Physics
%R CaltechAUTHORS:ZWOjcp08
%L caltechauthors11627