Electron wavepacket interference in a magnetic field

C. T. Butler

David Farrelly, Ernestine A. Lee, T. Uzer

This article demonstrates that coherent states in Rydberg atoms can be produced and stabilized by combining a circularly polarized microwave field with a static, perpendicular magnetic field. These electronic wavepackets owe their stability to atomic analogs of the Lagrange equilibria which confine Jupiter's Trojan asteroids. While these “Trojan” wavepackets may slowly decay due to tunneling, a more significant source of dispersion will arise if the tails of the wavepacket penetrate appreciably into the non-linear or chaotic parts of phase space. In the laboratory frame, if these dispersive factors can be minimized — and this may be accomplished using magnetic fields — the electronic wavepacket will travel along a circular Kepler orbit while remaining localized radially and angularly for a finite — but large — number of Kepler periods. In this sense, the system is a classical Bohr atom.

Laurence D. Marks

Muhammad alswairi

This is the second companion paper to the Relative Field Localization (RFL) framework (RFL v8.0). It presents a physical account of the double-slit experiment within RFL. In RFL, the electron is treated as an extended wavepacket of conserved charge with an oscillating phase. When the wavepacket reaches the slits, it splits into two components that overlap and interfere behind the barrier. The interference pattern appears in the charge density j^0. At the screen, the charge localizes into a Q-ball at the peak of j^0, producing a single dot per electron. Over many electrons, the distribution of dots follows the Born rule |ψ|², and the interference pattern emerges statistically. When a measurement apparatus is placed at the slits, the interaction triggers localization before the electron reaches the screen, and the pattern disappears. The analysis covers:• The extended wavepacket before the slits, with Gaussian envelope and oscillating phase• The splitting of the wavepacket at the slits into two spherical components• The interference of the two components behind the barrier• The localization at the screen and the emergence of a single dot• The statistical buildup of the interference pattern from 1 to 100,000 electrons• The disappearance of the pattern when measurement is performed at the slits• The stochastic trajectory of the charge peak The account follows from the RFL localization law τ_loc = S_RL · L³ · m². This paper is the second in a series of three companion papers. The other two are:• RFL Applications I: Thermal Effects in Quantum Computing• RFL Applications III: Compton Scattering and the Measurement Mechanism

R.C. Liu, Brian Odom, Y. Yamamoto +1 more

Shih-Yuin Lin

Abstract We have developed a linearized effective theory with quantum mechanical Gaussian wavepacket of a charged relativistic particle coupled to quantum electromagnetic fields at a scale well below the Schwinger limit. Using this effective theory, we study the quantum decoherence of single electrons at rest due to their interactions with electromagnetic vacuum. According to the existing data of electron interference experiments in electron microscopes, the values of the parameters in our effective theory are chosen. With these values, we find that weak decoherence by vacuum fluctuations may have blurred the interference pattern in Ref. [1].