Variational Study on a Dissipative Two-Level System

A new variational approach is proposed to study the ground-state of a two-level system coupled to a dispersionless phonon bath. By the extended coherent state, where the more phonon correlations are easily incorporated, we can obtain very accurate ground state energy and the tunnelling reduction factor in all regime of tunnelling matrix element Δ₀ and coupling parameter s. The relative difference between the present ones and those by exact numerical diagonalization is less then 0.001%. In addition, some simple analytical results are given in the limits of Δ₀/s →0 and ∞.