Eur. Phys. J. D 35, 541-545 (2005)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2005-00067-y

Virtual photon effects on classical chaos in a periodically kicked Rydberg atom system

¹ Department of Electronic Science and Applied Physics, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350002, P.R. China
² Department of Physics, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, P.R. China

Corresponding author: ^a hongbinh@seu.edu.cn

Received: 10 March 2004
Revised: 5 May 2004
Published online: 12 May 2005

Abstract

We study classical chaos in the system of a two-level Rydberg atom interacting with a pulsed standing microwave. This model approaches the form of an atom optics realization of a usual delta-kicked rotor under the rotating-wave approximation (RWA). We find that the non-energy-conserving processes or virtual photon processes neglected in the RWA have a strong effect on the classical chaos, which can enhance, reduce and even completely suppress the chaos under certain kicked conditions. The system displays non-KAM dynamical behavior for rational and irrational kicks.