MISCELLANEOUS APPLICATIONS

So far I have employed functional integral methods in order to set up exact formal expressions which describe the thermodynamics and dynamics of damped quantum systems. Now we move to new grounds and consider the physical properties of exactly solvable damped linear systems, i.e. the damped quantum oscillator and quantum Brownian particle. Subsequently, I discuss a variational method which makes it possible for us to treat nonlinear damped quantum systems in much the same way as linear systems. I conclude this part with a brief general discussion of quantum decoherence.