The decay of excited He from stochastic density-functional theory: a quantum measurement theory interpretation

Recently, time-dependent current-density-functional theory has been extended to include the dynamical interaction of quantum systems with external environments (Di Ventra and D'Agosta 2007 Phys. Rev. Lett. 98 226403). Here we show that such a theory allows us to study a fundamentally important class of phenomena previously inaccessible by standard density-functional methods: the decay of excited systems. As an example we study the decay of an ensemble of excited He atoms, and discuss these results in the context of quantum measurement theory.