Abstract

A pair of harmonic oscillators come in contact and then separate. This could be a model of an atom encountering an electromagnetic field. We explore the coherence properties of the resulting state as a function of the sort of initial condition used. A surprising result is that if one imagines a large collection of these objects repeatedly coming in contact and separating, the asymptotic distribution functions are not Boltzmann distributions, but rather exponentials with the same rate of dropoff