ON THE NONPERTURBATIVE THEORY OF PURE DEPHASING IN CONDENSED PHASES AT LOW-TEMPERATURES

The nonperturbative treatment of the pure dephasing problem studied by Osad'ko and Skinner and Hsu is reexamined. It is found that these tre atments are inadequate for very low temperatures in the case of Ohmic friction. New nonperturbative methods are used to expose interesting p ure dephasing behavior at very low temperatures in this case. The meth ods are shown to coincide with the previous theories at higher tempera tures. The experimental detection of such phenomena is discussed. (C) 1996 American Institute of Physics.