What is it about?
Descending into the quantum world is like Alice going down the rabbit hole. As the Red Queen taught us, this world is very different —“It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.” The wave nature of particles creates an analogous effect at a corner. Indeed, a jump or a corner in a wave function, caused by the preparation mechanism, manifests itself in rays in space-time corresponding to motions considerably faster than the main wave packet. These rays originate from ripples in the Wigner function, reminiscent of the wave crests shown in the picture allowing the surfer to go "faster". We have coined this phenomenon "Diffraction in Phase Space".
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Photo by Mark Thompson on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Quantum technologies rely on an exquisite control of the microscopic world, in particular, on the manipulation of particles. Our work demonstrates that the conventional scheme of suddenly switching-off trapping fields can lead to unwanted and fast components of a desired slow motion.
Perspectives
This year we are celebrating 100 years of quantum mechanics. It is amazing that we still find in elementary quantum systems suprising effects of wave mechanics. We are convinced that diffraction in phase space can even be observed in experiments, for example, in an atom or a neutron bouncing in the gravitational field of the Earth.
Gregor Finkbeiner
Universitat Ulm
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Diffraction in phase space: Jumps and kinks in matter waves revealed by their dynamics, Chaos An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, March 2025, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/5.0260470.
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