A high-temperature limit penalizing high-frequency quantum fluctuations

Abstract: We revisit the Caldeira-Leggett model of quantum Brownian motion with Ohmic spectral density, and derive an additional contribution to the decoherence kernel in a new high-temperature limit at arbitrarily large cut-off frequency. This contribution reveals a novel mechanism for the classicalization of high-frequency quantum fluctuations. We further demonstrate that it leads to a Markovian master equation that is in guaranteed Lindblad form. Our approach considers in detail the behavior of the decoherence kernel at both the initial and final times of the process on the time scale of the bath memory.