Search results for "QUANTUM MECHANICS"
showing 10 items of 2468 documents
Quantum superpositions of clockwise and counterclockwise supercurrent states in the dynamics of a rf-SQUID exposed to a quantized electromagnetic fie…
2002
The dynamical behavior of a superconducting quantum interference device (a rf-SQUID) irradiated by a single mode quantized electromagnetic field is theoretically investigated. Treating the SQUID as a flux qubit, we analyze the dynamics of the combined system within the low lying energy Hilbert subspace both in the asymmetric and in the symmetric SQUID potential configurations. We show that the temporal evolution of the system is dominated by an oscillatory behavior characterized by more than one, generally speaking, incommensurable Rabi frequencies whose expressions are explicitly given. We find that the external parameters may fixed in such a way to realize a control on the dynamical repla…
Structure of the electromagnetic field around the free electron in nonrelativistic QED.
1991
We study, within the framework of nonrelativistic QED, the structure of the electromagnetic field in the neighborhood of a free spinless electron dressed by the interaction with the vacuum field. We introduce a suitable formalism that correlates electron position and field operators. The quantum average value obtained by applying correlated field operator to the dressed state gives the average value of the corresponding field quantity as a function of distance from the electron. The results obtained separately for the electric- and magnetic-field energy density around the particle display contributions that have quantum origin and that cancel in summing of the two, yielding the total energy…
Single particle motion in a Penning trap: description in the classical canonical formalism
1992
This paper aims at the development of methods for the calculation of the characteristic frequencies of a Penning trap, taking into account deviations of the actual geometry from the ideal one, anharmonicities of the electric potential, misalignments and inhomogeneities of the magnetic field, additional time dependent electromagnetic fields, and so on. The paper starts by describing the motion of a single charged particle in an ideal hyperbolic Penning trap using the formalism of classical hamiltonian mechanics. The usefulness of rotating coordinates is pointed out, and the importance of conservation of canonical angular momentum is stressed. After transformation to action-angle variables th…
Vacuum Casimir energy densities and field divergences at boundaries
2014
We consider and review the emergence of singular energy densities and field fluctuations at sharp boundaries or point-like field sources in the vacuum. The presence of singular energy densities of a field may be relevant from a conceptual point of view, because they contribute to the self-energy of the system. They should also generate significant gravitational effects. We first consider the case of the interface between a metallic boundary and the vacuum, and obtain the structure of the singular electric and magnetic energy densities at the interface through an appropriate limit from a dielectric to an ideal conductor. Then, we consider the case of a point-like source of the electromagneti…
Vacuum induced berry phase: Theory and experimental proposal
2003
We investigate quantum effects in geometric phases arising when a two-level system is interacting with a quantized electromagnetic field. When the system is adiabatically driven along a closed loop in the parameter space, signatures of the field quantization are observable in the geometric phase. We propose a feasible experiment to measure these effects in cavity QED and also analyse the semi-classical limit, recovering the usual Berry phase results.
Electromagnetic moments of quasi-stable particle
2010
We deal with the problem of assigning electromagnetic moments to a quasi-stable particle (i.e., a particle with mass located at particle's decay threshold). In this case, an application of a small external electromagnetic field changes the energy in a non-analytic way, which makes it difficult to assign definitive moments. On the example of a spin-1/2 field with mass $M_{*}$ interacting with two fields of masses $M$ and $m$, we show how a conventionally defined magnetic dipole moment diverges at $M_{*}=M+m$. We then show that the conventional definition makes sense only when the values of the applied magnetic field $B$ satisfy $|eB|/2M_{*}\ll|M_{*}-M-m|$. We discuss implications of these re…
Long-range potentials and electromagnetic polarizabilities
1976
The long-range spin and velocity independent forces of electromagnetic origin which act between any two systems are studied for those cases in which no forces of this type exist to order e 2 . It is shown that they are uniquely determined by the charge, magnetic moment, and polarizabilities of both systems, not only to the dominant order r − n , but also to the next one r −( n +1) . These potentials provide the link between Compton scattering polarizabilities (response to real photons) and classically defined polarizabilities (response to static electromagnetic field). The two definitions are shown to be equivalent for neutral spinless systems; the problems arising for a neutral particle wi…
Second quantization and atomic spontaneous emission inside one-dimensional photonic crystals via a quasinormal-modes approach
2004
An extension of the second quantization scheme based on the quasinormal-modes theory to one-dimensional photonic band gap (PBG) structures is discussed. Such structures, treated as double open optical cavities, are studied as part of a compound closed system including the electromagnetic radiative external bath. The electromagnetic field inside the photonic crystal is successfully represented by a new class of modes called quasinormal modes. Starting from this representation we introduce the Feynman's propagator to calculate the decay rate of a dipole inside a PBG structure, related to the density of modes, in the presence of the vacuum fluctuations outside the one-dimensional cavity.
Casimir-Polder potentials as entanglement probe
2007
We have considered the interaction of a pair of spatially separated two-level atoms with the electromagnetic field in its vacuum state and we have analyzed the amount of entanglement induced between the two atoms by the non local field fluctuations. This has allowed us to characterize the quantum nature of the non local correlations of the electromagnetic field vacuum state as well as to link the induced quantum entanglement with Casimir-Polder potentials.
Nonlocal properties of dynamical three-body Casimir-Polder forces
2005
We consider the three-body Casimir-Polder interaction between three atoms during their dynamical self-dressing. We show that the time-dependent three-body Casimir-Polder interaction energy displays nonlocal features related to quantum properties of the electromagnetic field and to the nonlocality of spatial field correlations. We discuss the measurability of this intriguing phenomenon and its relation with the usual concept of stationary three-body forces.