2004/04/14 by M. Turek, Turek, M., P. Rozmej +1
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Quantum chaos and dynamical systems #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/0404084
12 pages, 5 postscript figures, 1 jpg figure
arxiv created 2004/04/14 · openalex publication_date 2004/04/14 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Time evolution of radial wave packets built from the eigenstates of Dirac equation for a hydrogenic systems is considered. Radial wave packets are constructed from the states of different n quantum number and the same lowest angular momentum. In general they exhibit a kind of breathing motion with dispersion and (partial) revivals. Calculations show that for some particular preparations of the wave packet one can observe interesting effects in spin motion, coming from inherent entanglement of spin and orbital degrees of freedom. These effects manifest themselves through some oscillations in the mean values of spin operators and through changes of spatial probability density carried by upper and lower components of the wave function. It is also shown that the characteristic time scale of predicted effects (called Tls) is for radial wave packets much smaller than in other cases, reaching values comparable to (or even less than) the time scale for the wave packet revival.