Probing the nonexponential decay regime in open quantum systems

Abstract

The most important law of radioactivity is that of the exponential decay. In the realm of quantum mechanics, however, this decay law is neither rigorous nor fundamental. The deviations from the exponential decay have been observed experimentally at the early stage of a decay process, but there is little evidence for nonexponential behavior at long times. Yet such long-term nonexponentiality is expected theoretically to probe the nonresonant background components of the initial wave function which preserve the structural interference and the memory of how the state was created. In this paper, we propose new observables that can be used for experimental investigations of the post-exponential decay regime, including the decay of threshold resonances, particle correlations in three-body decays, and interference between near-lying resonances. While the specific examples presented in this work pertain to atomic nuclei, the properties of nonexponential decay are generic, i.e., they apply to other many-body open quantum systems, such as hadrons, atoms, molecules, and nanostructures.