ON THE QUANTIZATION OF LINEARLY DAMPED HARMONIC-OSCILLATOR

Using the equation of motion for a linearly damped harmonic oscillator as fundamental equation, a condition has been obtained that must be satisfied by its Lagrangian and a number of functional forms has been critically investigated. The Lagrangians that successfully describe a classical damped oscillator have been quantized using Feynman's elegant path integral method. However, it is found that the expectation value of energy of the damped oscillator in all the cases becomes infinitely large for t --> infinity, ruling out the possibility of treating the damped quantum system as a one-body problem.