Condensed Matter Physics Seminar
2 p.m., Thursday, October 19, 2006
Room 1201, Physics Building
Quantum Jumps and the Quasiclassical Motion of a Trapped Ion
Howard Carmichael
(Department of Physics, University of Auckland, New Zealand)
Abstract: The heating through resonance fluorescence of a
harmonically trapped ion excited by a standing-wave laser field is explored by
following the quantum-stochastic evolution of the center-of-mass wavepacket from
the ground state of the trap into the quasiclassical regime. A stochastic
Schroedinger equation incorporating quantum jumps is solved numerically and
compared with a semi-quantum treatment where center-of-mass recoil is taken into
account through momentum kicks added to otherwise unquantized center-of-mass
motion. Certain amplitudes of oscillation in the trap are shown to be metastable,
namely those for which the cycle-averaged field driving the atom is zero.
Features of the fully quantum mechanical simulation are shown to support a
quantum measurement interpretation, where the stochastic evolution works to
stabilize a quantum state consistent with the information gathered from the
environment, i.e., the observable fluorescence.
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Host: Orozco
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