Simulating quantum dissipation in many-body systems

An efficient Path Integral Monte Carlo procedure is proposed to simulate the behavior of quantum many-body dissipative systems described within the framework of the influence functional. Thermodynamic observables are obtained by Monte Carlo sampling of the partition function after discretization and Fourier transformation in imaginary time of the dynamical variables. The method is tested extensively for model systems, using realistic dissipative kernels. Results are also compared with the predictions of a recently proposed semiclassical approximation, thus testing the reliability of the latter approach for weak quantum coupling. Our numerical method opens the possibility to quantitatively describe real quantum dissipative systems as, e.g., Josephson junction arrays.