Lazar Friedland Abstract

Lazar Friedland
Hebrew University of Jerusalem

"Autoresonant Phase-Locking Transition: From the Pendulum to Rydberg Accelerator and Plutinos"

Autoresonance is a fascinating phenomenon of nonlinear physics, where a perturbed nonlinear system is captured into resonance and stays phase-locked with perturbing oscillations (or waves) continuously despite variation of system's parameters. The persistent phase-locking means excursion in system's solutions space and frequent emergence of nontrival coherent structures. For nearly half a century (starting from Veksler and McMillan in 1945) studies of autoresonance were limited to relativisitic particle accelerators, but many new applications of the autoresonance idea emerged since 1990 in atomic physics, nonlinear dynamics, nonlinear waves, plasmas, fluid dynamics, optics, and most recently, superconducting Josephson junctions and trapped antihydrogen experiments.

I will discuss the autoresonant bifurcation phenomenon and autoresonant control of orbital eccentricity and inclination of Rydberg atoms by a chirped frequency electric field. The 3D manipulation can be achieved by passage through and capture into different resonances, provided the driving field amplitude exceeds a threshold. A similar phenomenon explains the Plutiino puzzle in the early evolution of the solar system.