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Physical Review A

Quantum-mechanical motion of Gaussian wave packets on elliptical and hyperbolic Kepler orbits in the Coulomb field

S. D. Boris, S. Brandt, Hans Dieter Dahmen, Tilo Stroh, Mary Lu Larsen

Published Oct 1, 1993• 16 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The quantum-mechanical motion of Gaussian wave packets on elliptical and hyperbolic orbits is calculated and shown in plots. The approximation scheme makes explicit use of energy and angular-momentum conservation thus guaranteeing controlled accuracy of the approximation over long-time intervals. This allows the study of the revivals, a phenomenon of particular interest in Rydberg atoms on elliptical orbits. A comparison with the behavior of a classical phase-space distribution of the same position and momentum widths is carried out.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.48.2574

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The quantum-mechanical motion of Gaussian wave packets on elliptical and hyperbolic orbits is calculated and shown in plots. The approximation scheme makes explicit use of energy and angular-momentum conservation thus guaranteeing controlled accuracy of the approximation over long-time intervals. This allows the study of the revivals, a phenomenon of particular interest in Rydberg atoms on elliptical orbits. A comparison with the behavior of a classical phase-space distribution of the same position and momentum widths is carried out.
The problem of deriving macroscopic properties from the Hamiltonian of the hydrogen atom is resumed by extending previous results in the literature, which predicted elliptic orbits, into the region of hyperbolic orbits. As a main tool, coherent states of the harmonic oscillator are used which are continued to imaginary frequencies. The Kustaanheimo-Stiefel (KS) map is applied to transform the original configuration space into the product space of four harmonic oscillators with a constraint. The relation derived between real time and oscillator (pseudo) time includes quantum corrections. In the limit $\ensuremath{\hbar}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}0$, the time-dependent mean values of position and velocity describe the classical motion on a hyperbola and a circular hodograph, respectively. Moreover, the connection between pseudotime and real time comes out in analogy to Kepler's equation for elliptic orbits. The mean-square-root deviations of position and velocity components behave similarly in time to the corresponding ones of a spreading Gaussian wave packet in free space. To check the approximate treatment of the constraint, its contribution to the mean energy is determined with the result that it is negligible except for energy values close to the parabolic orbit with eccentricity equal to 1. It is inevitable to introduce a suitable scalar product in R4{\mathbb{R}}^{4}R4 which makes both the transformed Hamiltonian and the velocity operators Hermitian. An elementary necessary criterion is given for the energy interval where the constraint can be approximated by averaging.
We study the dynamics of a circular-orbit wave packet1 and find that it has both classical and quantum features. A circular-orbit wave packet consists of aligned, standard hydrogenic eigenstates of maximum angular momentum (l = in = n − 1), superimposed with a Gaussian weighting function. We calculate the uncertainty products in all three degrees of freedom and find that, as the quantum numbers of the constituent eigenstates increase, the uncertainty products tend toward h/2. The classical aspect of the dynamics displays itself during revivals, when a well-localized wave packet travels along a Kepler orbit, obeying the classical equations of motion. Spreading and revivals (including fractional revivals2) of the wave packet, which are manifestations of its quantum nature, are related to the nonlinearity of the hydrogen atom Hamiltonian. We study fractional revivals of the wavepacket in detail.
We investigate the semiclassical Kepler/Coulomb problem using the classical constants of the motion in the framework of Nelson's stochastic mechanics. This is done by considering the eigenvalue relations for a family of coherent states (known as the atomic elliptic states) whose wave functions are concentrated on the elliptical orbit corresponding to the associated classical problem. We show that these eigenvalue relations lead to identities for the semiclassical energy, angular momentum and Hamilton–Lenz–Runge vectors in the elliptical case. These identities are then extended to include the cases of circular, parabolic and hyperbolic motions. We show that in all cases the semiclassical wave function is determined by our identities and so our identities can be seen as defining a semiclassical Kepler/Coulomb problem. The results are interpreted in terms of two dynamical systems: one a complex valued solution to the classical mechanics for a Coulomb potential and the other the drift field for a semiclassical Nelson diffusion.
We present a theoretical construction for closest-to-classical wave packets localized in both angular and radial coordinates and moving on a keplerian orbit. The method produces a family of elliptical squeezed states for the planar Coulomb problem that minimize appropriate uncertainty relations in radial and angular coordinates. The time evolution of these states is studied for orbits with different semimajor axes and eccentricities. The elliptical squeezed states may be useful for a description of the motion of Rydberg wave packets excited by short-pulsed lasers in the presence of external fields, which experiments are attempting to produce. We outline an extension of the method to include certain effects of quantum defects appearing in the alkali-metal atoms used in experiments.
The quantum theory of atoms is based on a Hamiltonian which is just that of the classical Kepler theory of planetary orbits. In spite of this common foundation, the predictions of quantum theory ordinarily do not much resemble those of classical theory. Even in the limit of large quantum numbers the energy eigenstates of quantum theory do not look at all like the classical elliptical orbits. Recently, Parker and Stroud1 have shown that it is possible to excite a Rydberg atom wave packet whose radial dependence resembles the classical ideal of a particle traveling in an elliptical orbit. In this paper we discuss the formation of a wave packet in the polar and azimuthal angles by the coherent excitation of Rydberg states with the same principal quantum, but with a distribution of the angular momentum quantum numbers. When this wave packet is formed of the Rydberg states of an alkali atom the connection with classical theory is again striking. The wave packet precesses due to the core polarization, just as the classical elliptical orbit precesses due to an added r–4 perturbing potential.