### Bouncing a quantum particle back and forth

If you have not seen my previous two posts, you should read them first.

In the two previous posts, I shot particles (okay, simulated the shooting on a computer) at a single potential barrier and looked at what happens. What happens when we have more than one barrier? In the classical case the picture is easy to understand: a particle with insufficient energy to escape will be trapped in the local potential well for ever, while a particle with sufficiently high energy will gain freedom and never come back. But what happens in the quantum case?

If the intuition we developed from scattering a quantum particle against a potential barrier, where we see that depending on the frequency (energy) of the particle, some portion gets transmitted and some portion gets reflected, is indeed correct, what we may expect to see is that the quantum particle bounces between the two barriers, each time losing some amplitude due to tunneling.

But we also saw that the higher frequency components of the quantum particle have higher transmission amplitudes. So we may expect that the high frequency components to decay more rapidly than the low frequency ones, so the frequency of the “left over” parts will continue to decay in time. This however, would be wrong, because we would be overlooking one simple fact: by the uncertainty principle again, very low frequency waves cannot be confined to a small physical region. So when we are faced with two potential barriers, the distance between them gives a characteristic frequency. Below this frequency (energy) it is actually not possible to fit a (half) wave between the barriers, and so the low frequency waves must have significant physical extent beyond the barriers, which means that large portions of these low frequency waves will just radiate away freely. Much above the characteristic frequency, however, the waves have large transmission coefficients and will not be confined.

So the net result is that we should expect for each double barrier a characteristic frequency at which the wave can remain “mostly” stuck between the two barriers, losing a little bit of amplitude at each bounce. This will look like a slowly, but exponentially, decaying standing wave. And I have some videos to show for that!

In the video we start with the same random initial data and evolve it under the linear wave equation with different potentials: the equations look like

$\displaystyle - \partial^2_{tt} u + \partial^2_{xx} u - V u = 0$

where $V$ is a non-negative potential taken in the form

$\displaystyle V(x) = a_1 \exp( - x^2 / b_1) - a_2 \exp( -x^2 / b_2)$

which is a difference of two Gaussians. For the five waves shown the values of $a_1, b_1$ are the same throughout. The coefficients $a_2$ (taken to be $\leq a_1$) and $b_2$ (taken to be $< b_1$) increases from top to bottom, resulting in more and more-widely separated double barriers. Qualitatively we see, as we expected,

• The shallower and narrower the dip the faster the solution decays.
• The shallower and narrower the dip the higher the “characteristic frequency”.

As an aside: the video shown above is generated using Python, in particular NumPy and MatPlotLib; the code took significantly longer to run (20+hours) than to write (not counting the HPDE solver I wrote before for a different project, coding and debugging this simulation took about 3 hours or less). On the other hand, this only uses one core of my quad-core machine, and leaves the computer responsive in the mean time for other things. Compare that to Auto-QCM: the last time I ran it to grade a stack of 400+ multiple choice exams it locked up all four cores of my desktop computer for almost an entire day.

As a further aside, this post is related somewhat to my MathOverflow question to which I have not received a satisfactory answer.