Spin-orbit entanglement in time evolution of radial wave packets in hydrogenic systems

Abstract

Time evolution of radial wave packets built from the eigenstates of Dirac equation for a hydrogenic systems is considered. Radial wave packets are constructed from the states of different $n$ quantum number and the same lowest angular momentum. In general they exhibit a kind of breathing motion with dispersion and (partial) revivals. Calculations show that for some particular preparations of the wave packet one can observe interesting effects in spin motion, coming from inherent entanglement of spin and orbital degrees of freedom. These effects manifest themselves through some oscillations in the mean values of spin operators and through changes of spatial probability density carried by upper and lower components of the wave function. It is also shown that the characteristic time scale of predicted effects (called $T_{\mathrm{ls}}$) is for radial wave packets much smaller than in other cases, reaching values comparable to (or even less than) the time scale for the wave packet revival.