Rydberg wave packets and half-cycle electromagnetic pulses.

This dissertation summarizes an examination of the dynamics of atomic Rydberg wave packets with coherent pulses of THz electromagnetic radiation consisting of less than a single cycle of the electric field. The bulk of the energy is contained in just a half-cycle. Previous work (1, 10) has shown how these half-cycle pulses can be used to ionize the highly excited states of an atom, and that a classical view of electronic motion in the atom explains the ionization mechanism. To further probe the boundary between classical trajectories and quantum mechanics, in this work we investigate dynamical combinations of Rydberg states, or Rydberg wave packets, and how they ionize under the influence of a half-cycle electromagnetic pulse. With time-domain techniques we are able to extract the dynamics of the wave packet from the ionization rate. We then observe wave packet motion in both the electronic radial and angular coordinates, and can view it directly with the half-cycle pulse anywhere on its trajectory. This is the unique feature of half-cycle pulse ionization. Semiclassical ideas of ionization in conjunction with quantum descriptions of the wave packet, are capable of reproducing the main trends in our data, and in the absence of a rigorous model we rely on these. Experiments of this nature provide examples of the ongoing effort to use the coherent properties of radiation to control electronic motion in an atom, as well as to probe the boundaries between quantum and classical mechanics.Ph.D.Atomic physicsOpticsPhysicsPure SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130336/2/9722068.pd