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A looped animation of a wave packet propagating without dispersion: the envelope is maintained even as the phase changes. In physics, a wave packet (also known as a wave train or wave group) is a short burst of localized wave action that travels as a unit, outlined by an envelope.
This wave packet becomes increasingly localized with the addition of many waves. The Fourier transform is a mathematical operation that separates a wave packet into its individual plane waves. The waves shown here are real for illustrative purposes only; in quantum mechanics the wave function is generally complex .
A simulation of a wave packet incident on a potential barrier. In relative units, the barrier energy is 20, greater than the mean wave packet energy of 14. A portion of the wave packet passes through the barrier. The wave function of a physical system of particles specifies everything that can be known about the system. [8]
Dispersion occurs when sinusoidal waves of different wavelengths have different propagation velocities, so that a wave packet of mixed wavelengths tends to spread out in space. The speed of a plane wave, v {\displaystyle v} , is a function of the wave's wavelength λ {\displaystyle \lambda } :
In the limit of large field the state becomes a good approximation of a noiseless stable classical wave. The average photon numbers of the three states from top to bottom are n =4.2, 25.2, 924.5 [5] Figure 2: The oscillating wave packet corresponding to the second coherent state
In physics, a wave packet is a short "burst" or "envelope" of wave action that travels as a unit. A wave packet can be analyzed into, or can be synthesized from, an infinite set of component sinusoidal waves of different wavenumbers, with phases and amplitudes such that they interfere constructively only over a small region of space, and destructively elsewhere.
Intuitively the wave envelope is the "global profile" of the wave, which "contains" changing "local profiles inside the global profile". Each propagates at generally different speeds determined by the important function called the dispersion relation .
Partial-wave analysis, in the context of quantum mechanics, refers to a technique for solving scattering problems by decomposing each wave into its constituent angular-momentum components and solving using boundary conditions.