Dynamics of ultracold molecules in confined geometry and electric field

We present a time-independent quantum formalism to describe the dynamics of molecules with permanent electric dipole moments in a two-dimensional confined geometry such as a one-dimensional optical lattice, in the presence of an electric field. Bose/Fermi statistics and selection rules play a crucial role in the dynamics. As examples, we compare the dynamics of confined fermionic and bosonic polar KRb molecules under different confinements and electric fields. We show how chemical reactions can be suppressed, either by a "statistical suppression" which applies for fermions at small electric fields and confinements, or by a "potential energy suppression", which applies for both fermions and bosons at high electric fields and confinements. We also explore collisions that transfer molecules from one state of the confining potential to another. Although these collisions can be significant, we show that they do not play a role in the loss of the total number of molecules in the gas.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure

Pair creation in boost-invariantly expanding electric fields and two-particle correlations

Pair creation of scalar particles in a boost-invariant electric field which is confined in the forward light cone is studied. We present the proper-time evolution of momentum distributions of created particles, which preserve the boost invariance of the background field. The two-particle correlation of the created particles is also calculated. We find that long-range rapidity correlations may arise from the Schwinger mechanism in the boost-invariant electric field.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures; v2: minor changes, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Unified Treatment of Mixed Vector-Scalar Screened Coulomb Potentials for Fermions

The problem of a fermion subject to a general mixing of vector and scalar screened Coulomb potentials in a two-dimensional world is analyzed and quantization conditions are found.Comment: 7 page

Reflection above the barrier as tunneling in momentum space

Quantum mechanics predicts an exponentially small probability that a particle with energy greater than the height of a potential barrier will nevertheless reflect from the barrier in violation of classical expectations. This process can be regarded as tunneling in momentum space, leading to a simple derivation of the reflection probability.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, submitted to American Journal of Physics. Version 2: MIT preprint number added, typographical error in caption to Figure 2 correcte

Bound state equivalent potentials with the Lagrange mesh method

The Lagrange mesh method is a very simple procedure to accurately solve eigenvalue problems starting from a given nonrelativistic or semirelativistic two-body Hamiltonian with local or nonlocal potential. We show in this work that it can be applied to solve the inverse problem, namely, to find the equivalent local potential starting from a particular bound state wave function and the corresponding energy. In order to check the method, we apply it to several cases which are analytically solvable: the nonrelativistic harmonic oscillator and Coulomb potential, the nonlocal Yamaguchi potential and the semirelativistic harmonic oscillator. The potential is accurately computed in each case. In particular, our procedure deals efficiently with both nonrelativistic and semirelativistic kinematics.Comment: 6 figure

Dangerous Angular KK/Glueball Relics in String Theory Cosmology

The presence of Kaluza-Klein particles in the universe is a potential manifestation of string theory cosmology. In general, they can be present in the high temperature bath of the early universe. In particular examples, string theory inflation often ends with brane-antibrane annihilation followed by the energy cascading through massive closed string loops to KK modes which then decay into lighter standard model particles. However, massive KK modes in the early universe may become dangerous cosmological relics if the inner manifold contains warped throat(s) with approximate isometries. In the complimentary picture, in the AdS/CFT dual gauge theory with extra symmetries, massive glueballs of various spins become the dangerous cosmological relics. The decay of these angular KK modes/glueballs, located around the tip of the throat, is caused by isometry breaking which results from gluing the throat to the compact CY manifold. We address the problem of these angular KK particles/glueballs, studying their interactions and decay channels, from the theory side, and the resulting cosmological constraints on the warped compactification parameters, from the phenomenology side. The abundance and decay time of the long-lived non-relativistic angular KK modes depend strongly on the parameters of the warped geometry, so that observational constraints rule out a significant fraction of the parameter space. In particular, the coupling of the angular KK particles can be weaker than gravitational.Comment: 58 pages, 11 figures, published versio

Ground-state properties of trapped Bose-Einstein condensates: Extension of the Thomas-Fermi approximation

We derive general approximate formulas that provide with remarkable accuracy the ground-state properties of any mean-field scalar Bose-Einstein condensate with short-range repulsive interatomic interactions, confined in arbitrary cylindrically symmetric harmonic traps. Our formulation is even applicable for condensates containing a multiply quantized axisymmetric vortex. We have checked the validity of our formulas by numerically solving the 3D Gross-Pitaevskii equation.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures. Final version published in Phys. Rev. A. New formulas for the local sound velocity of cigar-shaped and disk-shaped condensates have been obtained. This paper generalizes our previous work cond-mat/070169

Theory of resonance energy transfer involving nanocrystals: the role of high multipoles

A theory for the fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) between a pair of semiconducting nanocrystal quantum dots is developed. Two types of donor-acceptor couplings for the FRET rate are described: dipole-dipole (d-d) and the dipole-quadrupole (d-q) coupling. The theory builds on a simple effective mass model which is used to relate the FRET rate to measureable quantities such as the nanocrystal size, fundamental gap, effective mass, exciton radius and dielectric constant. We discuss the relative contribution to the FRET rate of the different multipole terms, the role of strong to weak confinement limits, and the effects of nanocrystal siz-es.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Effective Hamiltonians for atoms in very strong magnetic fields

We propose three effective Hamiltonians which approximate atoms in very strong homogeneous magnetic fields $B$ modelled by the Pauli Hamiltonian, with fixed total angular momentum with respect to magnetic field axis. All three Hamiltonians describe $N$ electrons and a fixed nucleus where the Coulomb interaction has been replaced by $B$-dependent one-dimensional effective (vector valued) potentials but without magnetic field. Two of them are solvable in at least the one electron case. We briefly sketch how these Hamiltonians can be used to analyse the bottom of the spectrum of such atoms.Comment: 43 page

Reflection and Transmission at the Apparent Horizon during Gravitational Collapse

We examine the wave-functionals describing the collapse of a self-gravitating dust ball in an exact quantization of the gravity-dust system. We show that ingoing (collapsing) dust shell modes outside the apparent horizon must necessarily be accompanied by outgoing modes inside the apparent horizon, whose amplitude is suppressed by the square root of the Boltzmann factor at the Hawking temperature. Likewise, ingoing modes in the interior must be accompanied by outgoing modes in the exterior, again with an amplitude suppressed by the same factor. A suitable superposition of the two solutions is necessary to conserve the dust probability flux across the apparent horizon, thus each region contains both ingoing and outgoing dust modes. If one restricts oneself to considering only the modes outside the apparent horizon then one should think of the apparent horizon as a partial reflector, the probability for a shell to reflect being given by the Boltzmann factor at the Hawking temperature determined by the mass contained within it. However, if one considers the entire wave function, the outgoing wave in the exterior is seen to be the transmission through the horizon of the interior outgoing wave that accompanies the collapsing shells. This transmission could allow information from the interior to be transferred to the exterior.Comment: 19 pages, no figures. To appear in Phys. Rev.