[FRIAM] "I have no idea what's going on." -- Towelie

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Right. That's why I qualified it with "if not a strict hierarchy". A basic question that demonstrates my ignorance of physics is: Can an atom jump, say, 2 energy levels with 1 photon of 2x the energy, where it would otherwise jump 2 levels with 2 photons of 1x the energy? I.e. what I (probably mistakenly) call "cross-trophic" interaction.

An additional basic question would be whether or not there are "lateral states of different kind" (that's my own nonsense phrase). I.e. maybe an atom can be in an energy state X that is (reductively) the same energy level as another state Y, but with or without the ability to move from state X to state Y without going up or down in energy level?

I presume that in complicated (coherent) systems, with lots of particles, the 2nd question comes out "yes". But in the Monte Carlo style experiment described in Subhanker et al, where each particle is clamped separately, I have no idea. The mysterious incantations of dipole fields and Rabi frequencies seem to imply you could clamp a system with different types of lasers to get "lateral states of different kind" ... it even seems reasonable you could apply two different lasers to the same atom ... though I'm confident in my uncertainty, there.

On 5/17/19 11:28 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I didn't trace through all this, but what about degenerate states (with large Hamming distances)?

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