Osnabrück 2002 – scientific programme
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A: Atomphysik
A 17: Atome in äusseren Feldern
A 17.3: Talk
Thursday, March 7, 2002, 17:00–17:15, HS 01/EZ04
Classical Scaling of Non-Classical Alkali Rydberg States — •Andreas Krug1,2 and Andreas Buchleitner2 — 1MPI für Quantenoptik, D-85748 Garching b. München — 2MPI für Physik komplexer Systeme, D-01187 Dresden
Microwave driven Rydberg atoms are a paradigm of the manifestation of
classical nonlinear motion in real existing quantum systems.
While the overall dynamics of microwave driven atomic hydrogen is
nowadays well-understood, arguably the larger part of the experiments
on microwave ionization were performed on alkali Rydberg atoms, and
showed marked differences as compared to hydrogen.
However, the alkali dynamics can a priori not be interpreted in terms
of classical chaos and its suppression due to quantum interferences
as in the case of atomic hydrogen. On the contrary, the nonhydrogenic
atomic core has to be treated quantum mechanically,
and – due to the lack of a well-defined classical Hamiltonian for alkali
atoms – there is no uniquely defined analogon to the hydrogenic Kepler
frequency, which is crucial for the understanding of the hydrogenic
ionization process.
On the basis of an exact numerical treatment of the dynamics of
microwave
driven alkali Rydberg states, we identify the relevant frequency scale
of the dynamics of driven alkali atoms. Our results enforce a
reinterpretation of experimental alkali results so far available, and
ultimately allow to establish scaling rules for driven alkali atoms.