"Quantum Vortices in Ionization Collisions" - R. O. Barrachina

Thursday 2 Apr 2015, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Paris

Vortices routinely appear in classical liquids, gases and plasmas; as well as in superfluids, superconductors and Bose-Einstein condensates. In this communication, we discuss a different kind of vortices that might appear in ionization collisions. In the framework of de Broglie – Bohm and Madelung’s Hydrodynamic formulations of Quantum Mechanics, the time evolution of the corresponding few-body state is equivalent to the flow of a perfect fluid. During the ionization process, irrotational vortices might appear as closed submanifolds of co-dimension 2 or in pairs of opposite circulation. They may collapse later, but some can survive up to macroscopic distances and manifest themselves as zeros of the multiple differential cross section. The presence of this kind of quantum structure has been recently studied in the ionization of atoms by intense electric pulses and by the impact of electrons, positrons and ions. In this communication, we discuss the origin, topology and dynamics of these fascinating and intriguing quantum structures.