On zitterbewegung

David Hestenes

Chandana Roy, Chandan Basu, Anushree Roy

John Maddox

Yi‐Cai Zhang, Shu-Wei Song, Chaofei Liu +1 more

The Zitterbewegung effect in spin-orbit-coupled spin-1 cold atoms is investigated in the presence of the Zeeman field and a harmonic trap. It is shown that the Zeeman field and the harmonic trap have significant effect on the Zitterbewegung oscillatory behaviors. The external Zeeman field could suppress or enhance the Zitterbewegung amplitude and change the frequencies of oscillation. A much slowly damping Zitterbewegung oscillation can be achieved by adjusting both the linear and the quadratic Zeeman fields. Multifrequency Zitterbewegung oscillation can be induced by the applied Zeeman field. In the presence of the harmonic trap, the subpackets corresponding to different eigenenergies would always keep coherent, resulting in the persistent Zitterbewegung oscillations. The Zitterbewegung oscillation would display very complicated and irregular oscillation characteristics due to the coexistence of different frequencies of the Zitterbewegung oscillation. Furthermore, numerical results show that the Zitterbewegung effect is robust even in the presence of interaction between atoms.

Kunling Wang, Tao Liu, Mang Feng +2 more

Zitterbewegung (ZB), the trembling of free relativistic electrons in a vacuum, could be simulated by a single trapped ion. We focus on the variations of ZB under different parity conditions and find no ZB in the case of odd or even parity. ZB occurs only for the admixture of the odd- and even-parity states. We also show that a similar role is played by the parity operator for the trapped ion in Fock-state representation and the space-inversion operator for a realistic relativistic electron. Although the ZB effect is invisible in a relativistic electron, preparation of the trapped ion in different parity states is a sophisticated job, which makes it possible to observe the parity-relevant ZB effects with currently available techniques.

Tihomir G. Tenev, Nikolay V. Vitanov

Zitterbewegung of neutral relativistic particles propagating along a constant magnetic and/or electric field is studied. It is shown that spin Zitterbewegung, when superimposed on the Larmor precession frequency, leads to a beating pattern. The existence of a forbidden frequency of spin precession is predicted. Modifications of position and velocity Zitterbewegung due to lifted spin degeneracy manifested in the appearance of longitudinal and transversal Zitterbewegung, each with two Zitterbewegung frequencies and resulting beating patterns, are reported.