Freiburg 2024 – scientific programme

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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik

Q 58: Ultra-cold Atoms, Ions and BEC IV (joint session A/Q)

Q 58.5: Talk

Friday, March 15, 2024, 12:00–12:15, HS 1098

Spontaneous ignition of an ion trap engine — •Peter Stabel, Diego Fieguth, and James Anglin — RPTU Kaiserslautern

Do the microscopic roots of thermodynamics extend even before the onset of chaotic ergodization, into the integrable Hamiltonian mechanics of small, isolated systems? Here we propose a set of experiments on the three-dimensional motion of a single ion in a linear Paul Trap, in which the focus is not on any form of thermalization, but on the engine-like secular transfer of energy between fast and slow degrees of freedom, analogous to the rapid motions of hot gas particles slowly lifting a weight. The ion's three motional degrees of freedom constitute the entire system, which is isolated and undriven; a high-frequency transverse vibrational mode of the ion plays the role of a battery or fuel tank, or hot reservoir to power steady axial motion against an opposing force. We show that this combustion engine-like system can generically run autonomously, but that only under a certain more stringent condition can the engine also start autonomously. This non-trivial condition for autonomous starting of the engine-like process can be derived from unitarity, via the classical Kruskal-Neishtadt-Henrard theorem and its recent quantum extension. Although these post-adiabatic theorems do not involve ergodization, they do involve a certain increase of phase space areas, or subspace dimensions, and may play a role similar to that played macroscopically by thermodynamics, in constraining the design of microscopic autonomous machines.

Keywords: non-linear dynamics; Hamiltonian analogs of combustion engines; microscopic autonomous machines; post-adiabatic theory