Quantum thermodynamics of systems with anomalous dissipative coupling

The standard system-plus-reservoir approach used in the study of dissipative systems can be meaningfully generalized to a dissipative coupling involving the momentum, instead of the coordinate: the corresponding equation of motion differs from the Langevin equation, so this is called anomalous dissipation. It occurs for systems where such coupling can indeed be derived from the physical analysis of the degrees of freedom that can be treated as a dissipation bath. Starting from the influence functional corresponding to anomalous dissipation, it is shown how to derive the effective classical potential that gives the quantum thermal averages for the dissipative system in terms of classical-like calculations; the generalization to many degrees of freedom is given. The formalism is applied to a single particle in a double well and to the discrete phi(4) model. At variance with the standard case, the fluctuations of the coordinate are enhanced by anomalous dissipative coupling.