Abstract. For the time development of a single system in the quantum jump approach or for quantum trajectories one requires the conditional (reduced) Hamiltonian between jumps and the reset operator after a jump. Explicit expressions for them are derived for a general N-level system by employing the same assumptions as in the usual derivation of the Bloch equations. We discuss a possible minor problem with positivity for these expressions as well as for the corresponding Bloch equations.

Print publication: Issue 1 (February 1996)