The processes of radiation damping and decoherence in Quantum Electrodynamics are studied from an open system’s point of view. Employing functional techniques of field theory, the degrees of freedom of the radiation field are eliminated to obtain the influence phase functional which describes the reduced dynamics of the matter variables. The general theory is applied to the dynamics of a single...

The dephasing of particle plasmons is investigated using light-scattering spectroscopy on individual gold nanoparticles. We find a drastic reduction of the plasmon dephasing rate in nanorods as compared to small nanospheres due to a suppression of interband damping. The rods studied here also show very little radiation damping, due to their small volumes. These findings imply large local-field ...

We examine the evolution of magnetic fields in an expanding fluid composed of matter and radiation with particular interest in the evolution of cosmic magnetic fields. We derive the propagation velocities and damping rates for relativistic and non-relativistic fast and slow magnetosonic, and Alfvén waves in the presence of viscous and heat conducting processes. The analysis covers all MHD modes...

In this Letter we calculate the e ects of a linearly varying focusing eld on radiation damping and quantum excitation in an electron storage ring using a quantum mechanical perturbation approach. This model correctly predicts the limits of pure bending and pure focusing. We nd that quantum excitation can be exponentially suppressed by the focusing eld when the radiation formation length is comp...