Quantum theory of local diffusion coefficient and stopping power for channeled particles

H. Nitta, Shu Namiki, Y. H. Ohtsuki

Yeongsun Lee, Pavel Aleynikov, Jong-Kyu Park

Fast electrons in partially ionized plasmas lose energy through inelastic collisions with bound electrons. While the mean energy loss is well described by stopping-power theory, fluctuations associated with discrete excitation and ionization events produce energy straggling and an additional longitudinal diffusion in momentum space. We incorporate this effect into fast-electron kinetics through a derived Fokker-Planck operator whose coefficients are obtained from ab initio quantum many-body simulations. We demonstrate that neglecting inelastic energy diffusion in partially ionized D-Ar plasmas can underestimate primary runaway-electron generation by several orders of magnitude.

Rolf Kuiper, Georg Wolschin

We investigate the energy dependence of stopping and hadron production in high-energy heavy-ion collisions based on a three-sources Relativistic Diffusion Model. The transport coefficients are extrapolated from Au + Au and Cu + Cu at RHIC energies (sqrt{s_NN)=19.6 - 200 GeV) to Pb + Pb at LHC energies sqrt{s_NN)= 5.52 TeV. Rapidity distributions for net protons, and pseudorapidity spectra for produced charged particles in central collisions are compared to data at RHIC energies, and discussed for several extrapolations to LHC energies.

J. Amran Sussmann

Simone Notarnicola

Periodically driven systems are nowadays a very powerful tool for the study of condensed quantum matter: indeed, they allow the observation of phenomena in huge contrast with the expected behavior of their classical counterparts. An outstanding example is dynamical localization: this phenomenon consists in the prevention of heating despite an external periodic perturbation. It has been defined for the first time in a single particle model, the kicked rotor. This chaotic system undergoes an unbounded heating in time in its classical limit; on the opposite, in the quantum regime, the kinetic energy grows until a saturation value is reached and the system stops heating. In my thesis I consider a chain of coupled quantum kicked rotors in order to investigate the fate of dynamical localization in presence of interactions. I remarkably show that a dynamically localized phase persists in the quantum system also in presence of interactions. This is an unexpected behavior since periodically driven, interacting, non-integrable quantum systems heat up to an infinite temperature state. Moreover, I find a genuine quantum dynamics also in the delocalized phase: the heating is not diffusive, as it happens in the classical system, but it follows a sub-diffusive power law. A focus on the properties of the Floquet eigenstates and operators matrix properties gives interesting hints, still under investigation, for a possible justification of the above mentioned slow heating.

L. de la Peña-Auerbach, Ana Marı́a Cetto