Coherent acceleration of material wavepackets in modulated optical fields

We study the quantum dynamics of a material wavepacket bouncing off a modulated atomic mirror in the presence of a gravitational field. We find the occurrence of coherent accelerated dynamics for atoms beyond the familiar regime of dynamical localization. The acceleration takes place for certain initial phase space data and within specific windows of modulation strengths. The realization of the proposed acceleration scheme is within the range of present day experimental possibilities

Integrability and strong normal forms for non-autonomous systems in a neighbourhood of an equilibrium

The paper deals with the problem of existence of a convergent "strong" normal form in the neighbourhood of an equilibrium, for a finite dimensional system of differential equations with analytic and time-dependent non-linear term. The problem can be solved either under some non-resonance hypotheses on the spectrum of the linear part or if the non-linear term is assumed to be (slowly) decaying in time. This paper "completes" a pioneering work of Pustil'nikov in which, despite under weaker non-resonance hypotheses, the nonlinearity is required to be asymptotically autonomous. The result is obtained as a consequence of the existence of a strong normal form for a suitable class of real-analytic Hamiltonians with non-autonomous perturbations.Comment: 10 page

Dynamics of some piecewise smooth Fermi-Ulam Models

We find a normal form which describes the high energy dynamics of a class of piecewise smooth Fermi-Ulam ping pong models; depending on the value of a single real parameter, the dynamics can be either hyperbolic or elliptic. In the first case we prove that the set of orbits undergoing Fermi acceleration has zero measure but full Hausdorff dimension. We also show that for almost every orbit the energy eventually falls below a fixed threshold. In the second case we prove that, generically, we have stable periodic orbits for arbitrarily high energies, and that the set of Fermi accelerating orbits may have infinite measure.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figure