Simulation of the hydrogen ground state in stochastic electrodynamics

2015/10/01 by Theo M Nieuwenhuizen, Matthew T P Liska · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #stochastic dynamics and bifurcation #Quantum and Classical Electrodynamics #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect

paper · doi:10.1088/0031-8949/2015/t165/014006

Abstract

Stochastic electrodynamics is a classical theory which assumes that the physical vacuum consists of classical stochastic fields with average energy 1 2 ℏ ω in each mode, i.e., the zero-point Planck spectrum. While this classical theory explains many quantum phenomena related to harmonic oscillator problems, hard results on nonlinear systems are still lacking. In this work the hydrogen ground state is studied by numerically solving the Abraham–Lorentz equation in the dipole approximation. First the stochastic Gaussian field is represented by a sum over Gaussian frequency components, next the dynamics is solved numerically using OpenCL. The approach improves on work by Cole and Zou 2003 by treating the full 3 d problem and reaching longer simulation times. The results are compared with a conjecture for the ground state phase space density. Though short time results suggest a trend towards confirmation, in all attempted modellings the atom ionises at longer times.

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• Relativity and radiation balance for the classical hydrogen atom in classical electromagnetic zero-point radiation

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