Quantum Motion in an Infinite Spherical Well

Requires a Wolfram Notebook System
Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.
Quantum billiards are an important class of systems showing a large variety of dynamical behavior ranging from regular motion through quasiperiodic behavior to strongly chaotic behavior. Suppose a single quantum particle, an atom, is in a superposition of two energy eigenstates, in the absence of measurement. This could be achieved by exciting the atom with coherent laser pulses. For this system, a transformation from regular to quasiperiodic motion is shown in the Bohm trajectories for this "unobserved" system. If, before emitting a photon, a position or energy measurement is made, the atom will remain in the superposition state.
[more]
Contributed by: Klaus von Bloh (October 2019)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Details
An unnormalized wavefunction of the Schrödinger equation
with mass is separable in spherical polar coordinates, such that
,
where is a spherical harmonic and
a spherical Bessel function [3]. The boundary condition that
at
is fulfilled when
is the
zero of the spherical Bessel function
. The quantized energy levels are then given by
,
where is the central potential energy with
.
In this Demonstration, the total wavefunction is defined by a superposition of two stationary eigenstates:
with .
For simplicity, set the mass and
equal to 1 (atomic units [4]).
In this case, the wavefunction for the quantum particle in an infinite spherical well in spherical polar coordinates [1] reads
.
The velocity field with the position
can be calculated from the current
or from the gradient of the total phase function from the wavefunction
in the eikonal form (often called polar form)
:
.
From the total phase function the gradient
, with the partial derivative
and so on, is given by:
,
and
.
For the initial point the velocity becomes indeterminate, and for
the velocity field
becomes autonomous, with
,
or in Cartesian coordinates,
,
and the atom orbits the axis along a circle of constant radius and with a constant angular speed depending on the azimuthal quantum number
(here,
, which is a multiple of
or
.
For greater accuracy, increase PlotPoints, AccuracyGoal, PrecisionGoal and MaxSteps.
Due to the computational limitations, here only two superposed states are investigated. For this case, there is no chaotic behavior in the quantum motion [5, 6].
References
[1] Bohmian-Mechanics.net. (Oct 18, 2019)
[2] S. Goldstein, "Bohmian Mechanics," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2017 Edition (E. N. Zalta, ed.), (Oct 24, 2019)plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/qm-bohm.
[3] O. F. de Alcantara Bonfim, J. Florencio and F. C. Sá Barreto, "Chaotic Bohm’s Trajectories in a Quantum Circular Billiard," Physics Letters A, 277(3), 2000 pp. 129–134. doi:10.1016/S0375-9601(00)00705-2.
[4] Wikipedia. "Hartree Atomic Units." (Oct 18, 2019) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_units.
[5] R. H. Parmenter and R. W. Valentine, "Deterministic Chaos and the Causal Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics," Physics Letters A, 201(1), 1995 pp. 1–8. doi:10.1016/0375-9601(95)00190-E.
[6] R. H. Parmenter and R. W. Valentine, "Erratum: Deterministic Chaos and the Causal Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Physics Letters A 210 (1995) 1)," Physics Letters A, 213(5–6), 1996 p. 319. doi:10.1016/0375-9601(96)00096-5.
Snapshots
Permanent Citation