Some Properties of Motion of Atoms near a Charged Wire

Abstract

We are concerned with the classical approach to atomic motions in the vicinity of a wire charged by an oscillating voltage. This mechanism has been proposed to serve for trapping cold neutral atoms. We prove that, under some conditions, the atom must either collide with the wire or escape to infinity in the radial direction. The presented results for the atom–wire problem extend and complement some earlier ones in the literature.