Quantization of the Damped Harmonic Oscillator Revisited

Abstract: We return to the description of the damped harmonic oscillator by means of a closed quantum theory with a general assessment of previous works, in particular the Bateman-Caldirola-Kanai model and a new model recently proposed by one of the authors. We show the local equivalence between the two models and argue that latter has better high energy behavior and is naturally connected to existing open-quantum-systems approaches.