Liouville superoperator formalism

The basic idea of the slow-motion theory is to treat the electron spin as a part of the lattice and limit the spin part of the problem to the nuclear spin rather than the IS system. The difficult part of the problem is to treat, in an appropriate way, the combined lattice, now containing the classical degrees of freedom (such as rotation in condensed matter) as well as quantized degrees of freedom (such as the electron Zeeman interaction). The Liouville superoperator formalism is very well suited for treating this type of problems. 

A. THE STOCHASTIC RELAXATION MODEL. The most general theories of magnetic relaxation in Mossbauer spectroscopy involve stochastic models see, for example. Ref. 283 for a review. A formalism using superoperators (Liouville operators) was introduced by Blume, who presented a general solution for the lineshape of radiation emitted (absorbed) by a system whose Hamiltonian jumps at random as a function of time between a finite number of possible forms that do not necessarily commute with one another. The solution can be written down in a compact form using the superoperator formalism. 

In this case the associated Liouville superoperator L t) with 36x36 total matrix elements is diagonal and the expression for the transverse magnetisation can be cast into three contributions with formal solutions in a scalar form ... 

The electric conductance of a molecular junction is calculated by recasting the Keldysh formalism in Liouville space. Dyson equations for non-equilibrium many-body Green functions (NEGF) are derived directly in real (physical) time. The various NEGFs appear naturally in the theory as time-ordered products of superoperators, while the Keldysh forward/backward time loop is avoided. 

Due to complexity of the real world, all QDT descriptions involve practically certain approximations or models. As theoretical construction is concerned, the infiuence functional path integral formulation of QDT may by far be the best [4]. The main obstacle of path integral formulation is however its formidable numerical implementation to multilevel systems. Alternative approach to QDT formulation is the reduced Liouville equation for p t). The formally exact reduced Liouville equation can in principle be constructed via Nakajima-Zwanzig-Mori projection operator techniques [5-14], resulting in general two prescriptions. One is the so-called chronological ordering prescription (COP), characterized by a time-ordered memory dissipation superoperator 7(t, r) and read as... 

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