Dissipation, coherence and entanglement

Abstract

The study of the damped harmonic oscillator shows that dissipation could be seen at the origin of the zero point energy, which is the signature of quantum behavior. This is in accord with ’t Hooft proposal that loss of information in a completely deterministic dynamics would play a rôle in the quantum mechanical nature of our world. We show the equivalence, within quite general conditions, between the pair of a damped oscillator and its time-reversed image and electrodynamics. The ground state of the damped-amplified oscillator pair appears to be a finite temperature coherent two-mode squeezed state with fractal self-similarity properties and the modes are maximally entangled. Temperature is strictly related to the zero point energy.