Manifestations of Quantum Mechanics in Open Systems: From Opto-Mechancis to Dynamical Casimir Effect

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to study the behaviour of different types of open systems in various scenarios. The first part of the thesis deals with the generation and the detection of quantum effects in mesoscopic devices subjected to dissipative processes. We show that genuine quantum features such as non-locality and negative values of Wigner function can be observed even in presence of a strong interaction of the system with the environment. Moreover, we prove that, in some particular circumstances, the action of the environment is directly responsible for the generation of a geometric phase in the system. The second part of the thesis focuses on the study of critical systems subjected to an external time-dependent parameters' modulation. More specifically, we propose a scheme for the observation of dynamical Casimir effect (DCE) close to the super-radiant quantum phase transition in the Dicke model. We also show that in this context the emergence of DCE is linked to another phenomenon typically related to criticality, the Kibble-Zurek mechanism.