The quantum pendulum: Small and large

American Journal of Physics

Volumn 70, Issue 5, 2002, Pages 525-531

  Baker, G L ^a   Blackburn, J A ^b   Smith, H J T ^c  

^a Bryn Athyn College of the New Church   (United States)

^b WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

^c UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 23044534621     PISSN: 00029505     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1119/1.1456069     Document Type: Article

References (25)

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23. A reviewer suggested that this discussion might be placed in the context of a realistic pendulum being at a certain temperature. Even at 1 K, the thermal energy is well above that of the ground state and therefore the resulting uncertainty in angular position will be about 105 smaller than predicted by our ground state calculation. However, the argument that quantum mechanics smears classical orbits still holds, although the limit is considerably smaller than the estimate in the body of the paper.
24. M. C. Gutzwiller, "Mild chaos," in Chaotic Behavior in Quantum Systems, edited by G. Casati (Plenum, New York, 1985), p. 149.
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