HIGH-HARMONIC GENERATION IN A DRIVEN TRIANGULAR WELL - THE IMPLICATIONS OF CHAOS

We compute the spectrum of emitted radiation for a particle in a trian gular potential well and driven by an electromagnetic field. For inten se fields, the spectrum exhibits a plateau structure, a series of harm onic peaks of comparable strength up to some high-harmonic order, simi lar to that found in experiments and similar theoretical models. By co mparing the quantum and classical dynamics, we see that the onset of h igh-harmonic generation in the quantum system appears to be correlated to the onset of chaos in the classical system. We also consider the e ffect of a slow turn on of the field and show why the acceleration sho uld be used instead of the induced dipole moment to compute the spectr um.