The Airy Wave Train

Initializing live version
Download to Desktop

Requires a Wolfram Notebook System

Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.

Berry and Balazs [1] found a particular wavepacket in terms of an Airy function with the following properties:

[more]

1. It does not spread as it evolves in time.

2. It preserves its shape.

3. It accelerates, despite the fact that there are no apparent forces acting.

[less]

Contributed by: Enrique Zeleny (August 2013)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA


Snapshots


Details

The solution for the Airy packet is

,

where is an arbitrary positive constant, is the mass of the particle, and for simplicity, Planck's constant is taken as .

References

[1] M. V. Berry and N. L. Balazs, "Nonspreading Wavepackets," American Journal of Physics, 47(3), 1979 pp. 264–267. doi:10.1145/641876.641879.

[2] T. Curtright. "Time Dependent Wigner Functions." (Aug 7, 2013) server.physics.miami.edu/~curtright/TimeDependentWignerFunctions.html.



Feedback (field required)
Email (field required) Name
Occupation Organization
Note: Your message & contact information may be shared with the author of any specific Demonstration for which you give feedback.
Send