Department of Physics,Nanjing UniversityAccording to Bohr’s correspondence principle, the classically defined regular motion and chaotic motionshould manifest themselves in the quantum mechanics, for example, in the temporal evolution of the quantumcoherent states. While as we know in the quantum me
By now the “chaos revolution” has reached nearly every branch of the natural sciences. In fact, chaos is everywhere. To name but a few examples, we talk about chaotic weather patterns, chaotic chemical reactions and the chaotic evolution of insect populations. Atomic and molecular physics are no exceptions. At first glance this is surprising since atoms and molecules are well described by the linear laws of quantum mechanics, while an essential ingredient of chaos is nonlinearity in the dynamic equations. Thus, chaos and atomic physics seem to have little to do with each other. But recently, atomic and molecular physicists have pushed the limits of their experiments to such high quantum numbers that it starts to make sense, in the spirit of Bohr's correspondence principle, to compare the results of atomic physics experiments with the predictions of classical mechanics, which, for the most part, show complexity and chaos. The most striking observation in recent years has been that quantum systems seem to “know” whether their classical counterparts display regular or chaotic motion. This fact can be understood intuitively on the basis of Feynman's version of quantum mechanics. In 1948 Feynman showed that quantum mechanics can be formulated on the basis of classical mechanics with the help of path integrals. Therefore it is expected that the quantum mechanics of an atom or molecule is profoundly influenced, but of course not completely determined, by the qualitative behaviour of its underlying classical mechanics.
Using the minimum uncertainty state of quantum integrable system as initial state, the spatiotemporal evolution of the wave packet under the action of perturbed Hamiltonian is studied causally as in classical mechanics. Due to the existence of the avoided energy level crossing in the spectrum there exist nonlinear resonances between some pairs of neighboring components of the wave packet, the deterministic dynamical evolution becomes very complicated and appears to be chaotic. It is proposed to use expectation values for the whole set of basic dynamical variables and the corresponding spreading widths to describe the topological features concisely such that the quantum chaotic motion can be studied in contrast with the quantum regular motion and well characterized with the asymptotic behaviors. It has been demonstrated with numerical results that such a wave packet has indeed quantum behaviors of ergodicity as in corresponding classical case.
Using the minimum uncertainty state of quantum integrable system Ho as initial state, the spatiotemporal evolution of the wave packet under the action of perturbed Hamiltonian is studied causally as in classical mechanics. Due to the existence of the avoided energy level crossing in the spectrum there exist nonlinear resonances between some pairs of neighboring components of the wave packet, the deterministic dynamical evolution becomes very complicated and appears to be chaotic. It is proposed to use expectation values for the whole set of basic dynamical variables and the corresponding spreading widths to describe the topological features concisely such that the quantum chaotic motion can be studied in contrast with the quantum regular motion and well characterized with the asymptotic behaviors. It has been demonstrated with numerical results that such a wave packet has indeed quantum behaviors of ergodicity as in corresponding classical case.