Copyright © 2004 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Elementary excitations (electrons, holes, polaritons, excitons, plasmons, spin waves, etc.) on discrete substrates (e.g., polymer chains, surfaces, and lattices) may move coherently as quantum waves (e.g., Bloch waves), but also incoherently (“hopping”) and may lose their phases due to their interaction with their substrate, for example, lattice vibrations. In the frame of Heisenberg equations for projection operators, these latter effects are often phenomenologically taken into account, which violates quantum mechanical consistency, however. To restore it, quantum mechanical fluctuating forces (noise sources) must be introduced, whose properties can be determined by a general theorem. With increasing miniaturization, in the nanotechnology of logical devices (including quantum computers) that use interacting elementary excitations, such fluctuations become important. This requires the determination of quantum noise sources in composite quantum systems. This is the main objective of my paper, dedicated to the memory of Ilya Prigogine.