Evolving momentum-projected densities in billiards with quantum states

Abstract

The classical Liouville density on the constant energy surface reveals a number of interesting features when the initial density has no directional preference. It has been shown (Physical Review Letters, 93 (2004) 204102) that the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the momentum-projected density evolution operator have a correspondence with the quantum Neumann energy eigenstates in billiard systems. While the classical eigenfunctions are well approximated by the quantum Neumann eigenfunctions, the classical eigenvalues are of the form f(\sqrt{E_n} vt) where {E_n} are close to the quantum Neumann eigenvalues and v is the speed of the classical particle. Despite the approximate nature of the correspondence, we demonstrate here that the exact quantum Neumann eigenstates can be used to expand and evolve an arbitrary classical density on the energy surface projected on to the configuration space. For the rectangular and stadium billiards, results are compared with the actual evolution of the density using classical trajectories.