Energy distribution of the quantum harmonic oscillator under random time-dependent perturbations.

This paper investigates the evolution of a quantum particle in a harmonic oscillator driven by time-dependent forces. The perturbations are small, but they act long enough so that we can solve the problem in the asymptotic framework corresponding to a perturbation amplitude that tends to zero and a perturbation duration that tends to infinity. We describe the effective evolution equation of the state vector, which reads as a stochastic partial differential equation. We exhibit a closed-form equation for the transition probabilities, which can be interpreted in terms of a jump process. Using standard probability tools, we are then able to compute explicitly the probabilities for observing the different energy eigenstates and give the exact statistical distribution of the energy of the particle.