Phenomena of damped harmonic oscillator is important in the description of the elementary dissipative processes of linear responses in our physical world. Its classical description is clear and understood, however it is not so in the quantum physics, where it also has a basic role. Starting from the Rosen-Chambers restricted variation principle a Hamilton like variation approach to the damped harmonic oscillator will be given. The usual formalisms of classical mechanics, as Lagrangian, Hamiltonian, Poisson brackets, will be covered too. We shall introduce two Poisson brackets. The first one has only mathematical meaning and for the second, the so-called constitutive Poisson brackets, a physical interpretation will be presented. We shall show that only the fundamental constitutive Poisson brackets are not invariant throughout the motion of the damped oscillator, but these show a kind of universal time dependence in the universal time scale of the damped oscillator. The quantum mechanical Poisson brackets and commutation relations belonging to these fundamental time dependent classical brackets will be described. Our objective in this work is giving clearer view to the challenge of the dissipative quantum oscillator.
Quantizing the damped harmonic oscillator
