High-frequency microwave ionisation of excited hydrogen atoms

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Abstract
The authors analyse the effect of a high-frequency electric field on an excited hydrogen atom. Using classical perturbation theory and correspondence principle methods they show that the quantal system can be described by a severely truncated basis comprising the photon states, which are relatively few in number. Further, the problem may be transformed, locally, to the standard map, but quantised with an effective Planck's constant which is of order unity; this implies that, for large scaled frequencies and for all initial principal quantum numbers accessible to current experiments, the quantal ionisation mechanism is unrelated to classical diffusion.