Thresholds to Chaos and Ionization for the Hydrogen Atom in Rotating Fields

Abstract

We analyze the classical phase space of the hydrogen atom in crossed magnetic and circularly polarized microwave fields in the high frequency regime, using the Chirikov resonance overlap criterion and the renormalization map. These methods are used to compute thresholds to large scale chaos and to ionization. The effect of the magnetic field is a strong stabilization of a set of invariant tori which bound the trajectories and prevent stochastic ionization. In order to ionize, larger amplitudes of the microwave field are necessary in the presence of a magnetic field.