Creating Shared Value: A How-to Guide for the New Corporate (R)evolution

Creating Shared Value (CSV) requires comprehensive and sustained efforts across a corporation. Drawing heavily on real-life examples, this report identifies ten key building blocks that together form a blueprint for translating CSV into action, and explores how companies can get started on that process

Theory of the spin bath

The quantum dynamics of mesoscopic or macroscopic systems is always complicated by their coupling to many "environmental" modes.At low T these environmental effects are dominated by localised modes, such as nuclear and paramagnetic spins, and defects (which also dominate the entropy and specific heat). This environment, at low energies, maps onto a "spin bath" model. This contrasts with "oscillator bath" models (originated by Feynman and Vernon) which describe {\it delocalised} environmental modes such as electrons, phonons, photons, magnons, etc. One cannot in general map a spin bath to an oscillator bath (or vice-versa); they constitute distinct "universality classes" of quantum environment. We show how the mapping to spin bath models is made, and then discuss several examples in detail, including moving particles, magnetic solitons, nanomagnets, and SQUIDs, coupled to nuclear and paramagnetic spin environments. We show how to average over spin bath modes, using an operator instanton technique, to find the system dynamics, and give analytic results for the correlation functions, under various conditions. We then describe the application of this theory to magnetic and superconducting systems.Particular attention is given to recent work on tunneling magnetic macromolecules, where the role of the nuclear spin bath in controlling the tunneling is very clear; we also discuss other magnetic systems in the quantum regime, and the influence of nuclear and paramagnetic spins on flux dynamics in SQUIDs.Comment: Invited article for Rep. Prog. Phys. to appear in April, 2000 (41 pages, latex, 13 figures. This is a strongly revised and extended version of previous preprint cond-mat/9511011