The Classical Atom: Stabilization of Electronic Trojan Wavepackets

David Farrelly

David Farrelly

Department of Chemistry, Utah State University, Logan, Utah 84322, USA

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Ernestine A. Lee

Ernestine A. Lee

Incyte Genomics, 3160 Porter Drive, Palo Alto, California 94304, USA

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T. Uzer

T. Uzer

Center for Nonlinear Sciences and School of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0430, USA

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First published: 27 August 2002

Summary

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.

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