ABSTRACT
Dissipation and decoherence in quantum systems have important practical implications, from stabilizing superconductivity in granular materials, to the loss of information stored in qubits. In the models we consider in this chapter, energy dissipation is introduced by coupling a quantum mechanical degree of freedom to a bath of suitably chosen harmonic oscillators. The degrees of freedom of this bath can be integrated out analytically, which leads to an effective action with long-range interactions in imaginary time. We will review and present a number of recently developed efficient cluster Monte Carlo algorithms for various dissipative quantum systems. This chapter is based in large part on Refs. [1, 2] but has been updated with more recent developments, especially in the applications section.
