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Adiabatic
Adiabatic
As early as 1902, Lord Rayleigh1 investigated a pendu- gence of interest from various different fields, such as plasma
lum the length of which was being altered uniformly, but physics, thermonuclear research or geophysics14 , although
very slowly (some mathematical aspects of the problem were perhaps Berry’s work on geometric phases15 has put it again
treated in 1895 by Le Cornu2 ). He showed that if E(t) denotes in the spotlight. The two monographs by Sagdeev et al16 and
the energy and `(t) the length [or, equivalently, the frequency Lochak and Meunier17 reflect this revival. More recently, the
ν(t)] at a time t, then issue has renewed its importance in the context of quantum
control (for example, concerning adiabatic passage between
E(t) E(0) atomic energy levels18–23 ), as well as adiabatic quantum com-
= . (1.1) putation24–26 .
ν(t) ν(0)
Adiabatic invariants are presented in most textbooks in
This expression is probably the first explicit example of an terms of action-angle variables, which involves a significant
adiabatic invariant; i.e., a conservation law that only holds level of sophistication. Even if a number of pedagogical pa-
when the parameters of the system are varied very slowly. The pers has tried to alleviate these difficulties27–34 , students often
name was coined by analogy with thermodynamics, where understand this notion only at a superficial level. Actually,
adiabatic processes are those that occur sufficiently gently. perfunctory application of the adiabaticity condition may lead
At the first Solvay Conference in 1911, Lorentz, unaware of to controversial conclusions, even in the hands of experienced
Rayleigh’s previous work, raised the question of the behavior practitioners35–38 .
of a “quantum pendulum” the length of which is gradually al- Quite often the Lorentz pendulum is taken as a typical ex-
tered3 (by historical vicissitudes4 his name has become inex- ample to bring up this twist for graduate students39,40 . In
tricably linked to that system). Einstein’s reply was that “if the spite of its apparent simplicity, the proof of invariance is gen-
length of the pendulum is changed infinitely slowly, its energy uinely difficult41–48 and details are omitted. The purpose of
remains equal to hν if it is originally hν”, although no detail this paper is to re-elaborate on this topic, putting forth per-
of his analysis are given. In the same discussion, Warburg in- tinent physical discussion that emphasizes the motivation for
sisted that the length of the pendulum must be altered slowly, doing what is done, as well as to present some variation of the
but not systematically. As Arnold aptly remarks5 “the person Lorentz pendulum in the hope that its solution will shed light
changing the parameters of the system must no see what state on the subject at an intermediate level.
the system is in. Giving this definition a rigorous mathemat-
ical meaning is a very delicate and as yet unsolved problem.
Fortunately, we can get along with a surrogate. The assump- II. THE UNIFORMLY VARYING PENDULUM
tion of ignorance of the internal state of the system on the part
of the person controlling the parameter may be replaced by A. Basic equations of motion
the requirement that the change of parameter must be smooth;
i.e., twice continuously differentiable”. This important point
is ignored in most expositions of adiabatic invariance. We confine our attention to the ideal case of a simple pen-
Ehrenfest, who did not attend the Solvay Conference dulum of mass m and variable length `(t), oscillating under
and was not cognizant of that discussion, had indeed read the gravity. The Lagrangian of the system is
Rayleigh’s paper and employed those ideas to enunciate his " 2 #
d` 2
famous adiabatic principle6 , which was promptly reformu- 1 2 dϑ
L= m +` + mg` cos ϑ , (2.1)
lated by Born and Fock7 in the form we now call adiabatic 2 dt dt
theorem8 . In fact, this was a topic of uttermost importance
in the old quantum theory9,10 . To put it simply, if a physical where ϑ (t) denotes the inclination of the pendulum with the
quantity is going to make “all or nothing quantum jumps”, it vertical. The Euler-Lagrange equation for the generalized co-
should make no jump at all if the system is perturbed gently, ordinate ϑ becomes
and therefore any quantized quantity should be an adiabatic
invariant. The reader is referred to the book of Jammer11 for d 2 ϑ 2 d` dϑ g
+ + sin ϑ = 0 . (2.2)
a masterful review of these questions, as well as the lucid and dt 2 ` dt dt `
2
0.86
p
and recalling that T = 2π `/g, we can rewrite (2.13) for the
example at hand as
0.84
δ` εT0 2π
=√ = √ 1, (2.15)
` 1+τ ω0 1 + τ 0.82
with T0 being the period of the pendulum at τ = 0. This re- 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0
quirement is independent of ϑ0 and, thus, independent of the
amplitude of the oscillations, which is intuitively expected.
Equation (2.15) clearly suggests that if the change in length FIG. 2. Plot of I(τ) as a function of τ for the uniformly vary-
is initially adiabatic, it will remain forever. Moreover, the adi- ing pendulum with `0 = 1 m and ϑ0 = 0.3 rad. The curves corre-
sponds to ω0 = 2, 10 and 1000 (which are associated with the values
abatic character of the system will improve as time goes on.
ε = 0.2491, 0.0498 and 0.00005 s−1 ), following the decreasing am-
Interestingly enough, condition (2.15) is formally equiva- plitudes.
lent to (2.8) ensuring the validity of the asymptotic approxi-
mation; they will always be satisfied whenever
which immediately leads to
ω0 ωlim = 2π , (2.16)
√ √
H(τ) = H0 π 2 ω02 [H222 (2ω0 1 + τ) + H212 (2ω0 1 + τ)] .
which, from the definition of ε, can be equivalently recast as
(2.22)
1
r
g Here, for notational simplicity, we have introduced the func-
ε εlim = . (2.17) tions
2π `0
H21 (x) = J2 (2ω0 ) Y1 (x) −Y2 (2ω0 ) J1 (x) ,
Equations (2.16) or (2.17) (which do not depend on time) pro-
vide a sensible criterion for the adiabatic change in a uni- (2.23)
formly varying pendulum. The lesser the initial length, the H22 (x) = Y2 (2ω0 ) J2 (x) − J2 (2ω0 ) Y2 (x) ,
more quickly can be lengthening the pendulum under the adi-
abatic hypothesis. Alternatively, ωlim can be seen as the mini- and H0 = ϑ0 ω02 ε√2 `2 /2 is the total energy at τ = 0. Finally,
0
mum value of ω0 for which the asymptotic expansion is valid since ν(τ) = ν0 / 1 + τ, with v0 = ω0 ε/2π, we get
independently of τ. H0 √
To give a more quantitative argument, we compute the func- I(τ) = 1 + τ π 2 ω02
ν0
tion √ √
× [H222 (2ω0 1 + τ) + H212 (2ω0 1 + τ)] . (2.24)
H(τ)
I(τ) = , (2.18) Because I(τ) is a time-dependent function, it will not be, in
ν(τ)
general, an adiabatic invariant. In other words, for arbitrary
that turns out to be an adiabatic invariant for arbitrary periodic values of the parameters, the solution (2.7) will not be as-
motions in one degree of freedom6 . Here H(τ) is the Hamil- sociated with adiabatic changes in the length of the pendu-
tonian and ν(τ) the frequency of the oscillations. lum. The function I(τ) is shown in Fig. 2 for different val-
For a pendulum, the Hamiltonian is ues of ω0 . One immediately concludes that the larger ω0 , the
lesser time-dependent I(τ) becomes, which is in full agree-
1 p2 1 ment with (2.16).
H= + g`ϑ 2 , (2.19)
2 `2 2 To complete the analysis, we proceed to calculate I(τ) with
the asymptotic approximations for the Bessel functions as in
where p = `2 dϑ /dt is the generalized momentum conjugate
Eq. (2.10). After a direct manipulation, we end up with
to ϑ .
Taking into account the relations51 H0
H(τ) ' √ (2.25)
d −1 d −1 1+τ
[x J1 (x)] = x−1 J2 (x), [x Y1 (x)] = x−1Y2 (x) ,
dx dx so that
(2.20)
and the solution (2.7), the angular velocity of the pendulum H0 3/2
I(τ) ' = π`0 ϑ02 g1/2 . (2.26)
can be expressed as ν0
πϑ0 ω0 ε √ This is an important result: for large enough values of τ, the
ϑ̇ = H22 (2ω0 1 + τ) , (2.21) quantity I(τ) becomes an adiabatic invariant. This validates
1+τ
4
−0.2
We turn now our attention to the instance where the length
of the pendulum is altered non uniformly. More concretely, −0.3
we take 0 1 2 3 4 5
`(t) = `0 eεt . (3.1) FIG. 3. Plot of the exact solution (in red) and the asymptotic approx-
imation (blue points) for the exponentially varying pendulum with
Equation (2.2), when small oscillations are considered, re- the same parameters as in Fig. 1.
duces in this case to
To fix the constants A and B we take the same initial conditions This points out the more important conceptual difference be-
as before, namely ϑ (0) = ϑ0 and ϑ̇ (0) = 0. Applying the tween these two cases: for the uniformly varying pendulum
relations the validity of the asymptotic expansion of the Bessel func-
tions only depends on the values of ε and ϑ0 , but it is inde-
d 2 d 2 pendent on the time. For the exponentially varying pendulum
[x J2 (x)] = x2 J1 (x), [x Y2 (x)] = x2Y1 (x) (3.5)
dx dx the validity of that approximation is time dependent and for
large values of the time this approximation breaks down.
in conjunction with the change of variable x = 2ω0 e−τ/2 and At first glance, this important difference between the two
the Wronskian penduli can seems only a formal one. However, as we shall
2 see in the following it has strong implications for the adiabatic
J1 (x)Y2 (x) − J2 (x)Y1 (x) = − , (3.6) invariance.
πx
one can show that the final solution is
B. Adiabatic invariance
ϑ (τ) = πϑ0 ω0 e−τ [Y1 (2ω0 ) J2 (2ω0 e−τ/2 )
− J1 (2ω0 ) Y2 (2ω0 e−τ/2 )] . (3.7) We next analyze the adiabatic change for this example.
Much in the same way as for the pendulum with uniformly Equation (2.14) applied to (3.1) gives as a requirement for
varying length, if adiabatic invariance
δ` 2π τ/2
2ω0 e−τ/2 1 , (3.8) = εT0 eτ/2 = e 1, (3.11)
` ω0
is satisfied, we can replace equation (3.7) by its asymptotic
approximation, leading to which again is formally equivalent to the condition (3.8) for
the validity of the asymptotic approximation of the Bessel
ϑ (τ) ' ϑ0 e−3τ/4 cos[2ω0 (1 − e−τ/2 )] . (3.9) functions.
This indicates that even if the change of length is initially
Within this approximation the maximum angular ampli- adiabatic, it will remain so only for a finite interval of time.
tude ϑmax scales exactly as in Eq. (2.11), and also To put in another way, (3.11) holds true whenever
limτ→∞ ϑmax (τ) = 0. However, as expected, the angular am-
plitude ϑmax falls off more quickly in this case. This behavior ω0 eτ/2 ωlim = 2πeτ/2 , (3.12)
5
1.05
The function I(τ) is represented in Fig. 4. As we can see,
the fluctuations of I(τ) increase with time. Thus, for large
1.00 enough time, I(τ) will never be an invariant quantity, irrespec-
tive of the value of ω0 . However, for the time window chosen
0.95 in the figure, we see that for ω0 = 1000, I(τ) looks invariant
over the entire interval.
0.90 Our last step is to calculate I(τ) using the asymptotic ap-
proximations for the Bessel functions. Now, we have
0.85
H(τ) ' H0 e−τ/2 (3.17)
0.80
so that
0.75
0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 H0 3/2
I(τ) ' = π`0 ϑ02 g1/2 , (3.18)
ν0
FIG. 4. Plot of I(τ) as a function of τ for the exponentially vary- which is identical to what we have obtained for the uniformly
ing pendulum with `0 = 1 m and ϑ0 = 0.3 rad. The curves corre- varying pendulum.
sponds to ω0 = 2, 10 and 1000 (which are associated with the values
ε = 0.2491, 0.0498 and 0.00005 s−1 ), following the decreasing am-
plitudes. IV. CONCLUDING REMARKS
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