Classical and semiclassical calculation of nuclear-electron coupling

Abstract

One aspect of making a gamma-ray laser concerns the rapid re lease of energy stored in a long-lived nuclear isomer. A proposed method for the release of this energy is to pump the isomerto a nearby, shorter-lived nuclear excited state. This excited state subsequently decays to a lasing transition. In this paper, we consider the dynamical coupling of the nucleon and electron motion using classical dynamics and calculate the perturbation on the spectra. In our model,1 a valence excited proton is bound as an independent particle to the nuclear core using a Woods-Saxon potential. The electron is bound to a core of protons and the valence proton by a Coulomb potential. Initial conditions for the classical trajectories were chosen to be semiclassical states of the separable Hamiltonian. A method2 to extract spectral information from classical trajectories is then used to calculate both transition intensities and frequencies. For some isomers, very strong coupling and chaotic motion were observed.