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Physical Review Letters

Nondispersing Wave Packets

H. Maeda, Thomas F. Gallagher

Published Apr 1, 2004• 75 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We have formed nondispersing wave packets from atomic Li Rydberg eigenstates by adding a small microwave field approximately resonant with the Deltan=1 transition. The orbital motion of the Rydberg electron in states of 70<or=n<or=78 becomes phase locked to a 17.5 GHz microwave field and remains so for 900 ns, roughly 15 000 orbits of the Rydberg electron. A Floquet approach provides a reasonable quantum-mechanical description.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.92.133004

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報文

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We have formed nondispersing wave packets from atomic Li Rydberg eigenstates by adding a small microwave field approximately resonant with the Deltan=1 transition. The orbital motion of the Rydberg electron in states of 70<or=n<or=78 becomes phase locked to a 17.5 GHz microwave field and remains so for 900 ns, roughly 15 000 orbits of the Rydberg electron. A Floquet approach provides a reasonable quantum-mechanical description.
Long-lived, nondispersing circular, or Bohr, wave packets are produced starting from Li Rydberg atoms by exposing them first to a linearly polarized microwave field at the orbital frequency, 17.6 GHz at principal quantum number n=72, which locks the electron's motion into an approximately linear orbit in which the electron oscillates in phase with the microwave field. The microwave polarization is changed to circular polarization slowly compared to the orbital frequency, and the electron's motion follows, resulting in a nondispersing Bohr wave packet.
It is possible to make nondispersing Bohr wave packets in a straightforward way starting from Li Rydberg atoms in an np eigenstate[2]. These atoms are first exposed to a linearly polarized microwave field at the orbital frequency, 17.6GHz at n = 72. The linearly polarized field phase locks the electron wave packet to the microwave phase, making a nondispersing wave packet in which the electron oscillates in a highly eccentric, approximately linear orbit. We detect the phase locked motion of the electron with a 1/2ps half-cycle pulse synchronized with the microwave field. Slowly changing the microwave polarization from linear to circular polarization creates a nondispersing Bohr wave packet that survives for thousands of orbits.
Nondispersive electronic Rydberg wave packets may be created in atoms illuminated by a microwave field of circular polarization. We discuss the spontaneous emission from such states, and show that the elastic incoherent component (occurring at the frequency of the driving field) dominates the spectrum in the semiclassical limit, contrary to earlier predictions. We calculate the frequencies of single-photon emissions and the associated rates in the ``harmonic approximation,'' i.e., when the wave packet has approximately a Gaussian shape. The results agree well with exact quantum-mechanical calculations, which validates the analytical approach.
We demonstrate the use of a periodic train of half-cycle pulses to maintain strongly-localized wave packets in very-high-nnn $(n\ensuremath{\sim}300)$ Rydberg atoms that travel in near-circular orbits about the nucleus. This motion can be followed for hundreds of orbital periods and mimics the original Bohr model of the hydrogen atom which envisioned an electron in circular classical orbit about the nucleus.