Fractional Revival of Rydberg Wave Packets in Twice-Kicked One-Dimensional Atoms

Abstract

We study revival and fractional revival phenomena of wave packets in a one-dimensional Rydberg atom irradiated by two time-delayed half-cycle pulses using an autocorrelation function characterized by electronic transition probabilities as weighting factors rather than modeling them by a Gaussian or Lorentzian distribution. If the momentum (q2) delivered to the atom by the second kick is much smaller than that (q1) imparted by the first one, the times of revival and fractional revival coincide with those of the single kicked atom. For q2 ≥ q 1 4 appearance of revival and fractional revival depends on both the values of q2 and time delay t1 between the pulses but more sensitively on t1. The number of fractional revivals tends to become numerous as the value of t1 increases.