2007/05/31 by A. Ridinger, N. Davidson, Nir Davidson · 18 citations
Chemistry · Physics and Astronomy · #Chemistry #Classical mechanics #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Dynamics (music) #Magnetosphere particle motion #Mechanics #Motion (physics) #Oscillation (cell signaling) #Particle (ecology) #Periodic potential #Phase (matter) #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #Spectroscopy and Quantum Chemical Studies #Work (physics) #cond-mat.other
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.76.013421
published in Physical Review A 76(1) (American Physical Society) · 9 pages, 8 figures, published in PRA
arxiv created 2007/07/27 · openalex publication_date 2007/07/27 · arxiv updated 2011/11/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
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, here we show that the motion of a particle and its trapping condition significantly depend upon this initial phase for arbitrarily high frequencies of the potential's oscillation. We explain this phenomenon by showing that the motion of a particle is determined by the effective potential stated in the literature only if its initial conditions are transformed according to a transformation which we show to significantly depend on the potential's initial phase for arbitrarily high frequencies. We confirm our theoretical findings by numerical simulations. Further, we demonstrate that the found phenomenon offers different ways to manipulate the dynamics of particles which are trapped by rapidly oscillating potentials. Finally, we propose a simple experiment to verify the theoretical findings of this work.