München 2004 – scientific programme

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A: Atomphysik

A 17: Fallen und Kuehlung

A 17.3: Talk

Thursday, March 25, 2004, 17:00–17:15, HS 132

Eigenmodes spectrum of a Coulomb chain in a harmonic potential — •Giovanna Morigi¹ and Shmuel Fishman² — ¹Abteilung Quantenphysik, Universitaet of Ulm, Albert-Einstein-Allee 11,D-89069 Ulm — ²Department of Physics, Technion, 32000 Haifa, Israel

The density of electrically charged atoms trapped in a harmonic potential in one dimension is not uniform. Consequentely the eigenmodes are not phonons. We calculate the long wavelength modes in the continuum limit, and evaluate the density of states for chains of N≫ 1 ions. Remarkably, the eigenmodes give already a good estimate of the spectrum of excitations of a chain of 10 ions. The results are used to compute the thermodynamic functions of the chain.