A Langevin canonical approach to the dynamics of chiral systems: populations and coherences.

A canonical framework for chiral two–level systems coupled to a bath of harmonic oscillators is developed to extract, from a stochastic dynamics, the thermodynamic equilibrium values of both the population difference and coherences. The incoherent and coherent tunneling regimes are analyzed for an Ohmic environment in terms of a critical temperature defined by the maximum of the heat capacity. The corresponding numerical results issued from solving a non-linear coupled system of equations are fitted to approximate path–integral analytical expressions beyond the so-called non-interacting blip approximation in order to determine the different time scales governing both regimes. Chirality 25:514–520, 2013. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.