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A: Fachverband Atomphysik

A 21: Atomic systems in external fields

A 21.7: Talk

Thursday, March 13, 2008, 12:45–13:00, 3D

Particle motion in rapidly oscillating potentials: The role of the potential's initial phase — •Armin Ridinger¹ and Nir Davidson² — ¹Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Université Pierre et Marie-Curie-Paris 6, CNRS — ²Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel

Rapidly oscillating potentials with a vanishing time average have been used for a long time to trap charged particles in source-free regions. It has been argued that the motion of a particle inside such a potential can be approximately described by a time independent effective potential, which does not depend upon the initial phase of the oscillating potential. However, we show that the motion of a particle significantly depends upon this initial phase for arbitrarily high frequencies of the potential's oscillation. We demonstrate that this phenomenon can be used to manipulate a particle's motion in a controlled fashion by simply changing the phase of the potential (a phase hop). For a particle in an ideal one-dimensional Paul-trap we show that a phase hop can---in the framework of classical mechanics---reduce the particle's energy to less than 30% of its original energy independently of its original energy and the frequency of the potential's oscillation. We confirm all our theoretical findings by numerical simulations.

Reference: A. Ridinger and N. Davidson, Phys. Rev. A 76, 013421 (2007).