Breakdown of homoclinic orbits to $L_1$ of the hydrogen atom in a circularly polarized microwave field

Abstract

We consider the Rydberg electron in a circularly polarized microwave field, whose dynamics is described by a 2 d.o.f. Hamiltonian, which is a perturbation of size $K>0$ of the standard rotating Kepler problem. In a rotating frame, the largest chaotic region of this system lies around a center-saddle equilibrium point $L_1$ and its associated invariant manifolds. We compute the distance between stable and unstable manifolds of $L_1$ by means of a semi-analytical method, which consists of combining normal form, Melnikov, and averaging methods with numerical methods. Also, we introduce a new family of Hamiltonians, which we call Toy CP systems, to be able to compare our numerical results with the existing theoretical results in the literature. It should be noted that the distance between these stable and unstable manifolds is exponentially small in the perturbation parameter $K$ (in analogy with the $L_3$ libration point of the R3BP).