Trojan wave packet

It is part of an artificially created system that consists of a nucleus and one or more electron wave packets, and that is highly excited under a continuous electromagnetic field.

Its discovery as one of significant contributions to the quantum mechanics was awarded the 2022 Wigner Medal for Iwo Bialynicki-Birula[1][clarification needed] The strong, polarized electromagnetic field, holds or "traps" each electron wave packet in an intentionally selected orbit (energy shell).

Ion traps allow the manipulation of atoms and are used to create new states of matter including ionic liquids, Wigner crystals and Bose–Einstein condensates.

Physicists at that time realized that any initially localized wave packet will inevitably spread around the orbit of the electrons.

[8][9] The trojan wave packet experiments built on previous work with lithium atoms in an excited state.

These are atoms, which respond sensitively to electric and magnetic fields, have decay periods that are relatively prolonged, and electrons, which for all intents and purposes actually operate in classical orbits.

[14] In 2012 an essential experimental step was undertaken not only generating but locking the trojan wavepackets on adiabatically changed frequency and expanding the atoms as once predicted by Kalinski and Eberly.

Trojan wavepacket evolution animation
Classical simulation of the trojan wavepacket on 1982 home ZX Spectrum microcomputer. The packet is approximated by the ensemble of points initially randomly localized within the peak of a Gaussian and moving according to the Newton equations . The ensemble stays localized. For the comparison the second simulation follows when the strength of the circularly polarized electric (rotating) field is equal to zero and the packet (points) fully spreads around the circle.
In physics, a wave packet is a short "burst" or "envelope" of wave action that travels as a unit. A wave packet can be analyzed into, or can be synthesized from, an infinite set of component sinusoidal waves of different wavenumbers , with phases and amplitudes such that they interfere constructively only over a small region of space, and destructively elsewhere. [ 11 ]