A tomographic technique is introduced in order to determine the quantum state of the center of mass motion of neutrons. An experiment is proposed and numerically analyzed.
The Feynman path integral formulation of non-dispersive Airy wave packets and their applications to the heavy meson mass spectra and ultra-cold neutrons
We present an exact solution to the one-dimensional (1-D) scattering-from-a-barrier problem for an incident neutron described by a wave packet. As an aid to presenting our approach, we spend some time on a basic review of how wave packets appear in standard quantum mechanics (SQM), paying attention to interpretive aspects of a working theory both familiar on the one hand while historically subject to debates, confusion, and misunderstandings on the other. Several appendices also are included to address various mathematical issues that may be helpful to some readers.
The time evolution of a quantum wave packet in the linear gravity potential is known as Quantum Bouncing Ball. The qBounce collaboration recently observed such a system by dropping wave packets of ultracold neutrons by a height of roughly 30 microns. In this article, space and momentum spectra as well as Wigner functions of the neutron wave functions in the gravitational field of the Earth are analyzed. We investigate the quantum states in the "preparation region", into which they transition after exiting a narrow double-mirror system and where we would expect to observe free fall and bounces …
Ultrafast electron diffraction and time-resolved serial crystallography are the basis of the ongoing revolution in capturing at the atomic level of detail the structural dynamics of molecules. However, most experiments employ the classical "ball-and-stick" depictions, and the information of molecular quantum states, such as the density matrix, is missing. Here, we introduce a framework for the preparation and ultrafast coherent diffraction from rotational wave packets of molecules, and we establish a new variant of quantum state tomography for ultrafast electron diffraction to characterize the…
The explicit expression for the inclusive probability to record a photon created in transition radiation from a one Dirac particle wave packet traversing an ideally conducting plate is derived in the leading order of perturbation theory. The anomalous magnetic moment of the Dirac particle is taken into account. It is shown that the quantum corrections to transition radiation from an electrically charged particle give rise to production of photons with polarization vector orthogonal to the reaction plane ($E$-plane). These corrections result from both the quantum recoil and the finite size of a…
We theoretically study an impulsively excited quantum bouncer (QB) - a particle bouncing off a surface in the presence of gravity. A pair of time-delayed pulsed excitations is shown to induce a wave-packet echo effect - a partial rephasing of the QB wave function appearing at twice the delay between pulses. In addition, an appropriately chosen observable [here, the population of the ground gravitational quantum state (GQS)] recorded as a function of the delay is shown to contain the transition frequencies between the GQSs, their populations, and partial phase information about the wave packet …