Canonical transformation and decay into phase-sensitive reservoirs.

We show that the master equation describing the dissipative evolution of a bosonic quantum system coupled to a phase-sensitive reservoir may be reduced to a standard form of dissipation for a thermal reservoir by canonical transformations. The solution to the master equation for complex phase-sensitive interaction induced, for example, by broadband squeezed light, may then be obtained by a transformation from the known solutions for the simpler thermal case. We show that canonical transformations have a particularly useful form when describing the evolution of quantum dissipative systems in phase space using the Wigner function. We illustrate these ideas with two phase-sensitive dissipative problems: that of the correlated-emission laser and of decay induced by a broadband squeezed vacuum field. © 1990 The American Physical Society