We address the issue of a system that has been tacitly made thermodynamically open by externally driving the associated heat bath in an attempt to gain better insight regarding many physical situations that are akin to this problem. This work embodies the study of the quantum effects in the rate of decay from a metastable state of a Brownian particle which is in contact with a correlated noise-driven bath. We do this by initiating from a suitable system-reservoir model to derive the operator-valued Langevin equation. This further leads us to the corresponding $c$-number analog that includes quantum effects in leading order. Suitable mathematical treatment culminates in the quantum Fokker-Planck equation, the solution to which yields the rate expression. Finally, we put this to thorough numerical analysis.

• Received 20 May 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.82.041113