Excited atoms in strong microwaves: classical resonances and localization in experimental final-state distributions

Highly excited hydrogen atoms have been exposed to an intense pulse of microwaves with frequency near the initial classical electron orbit frequency. Measurements were made of the probability distribution for different bound states after the pulse. Structure in such distributions is found to be near classical, and arises from the presence of a classical resonance island in action-angle space. The measured distributions also yield values of electron localization length in action space that are in agreement with quantum localization theory and with numerical values based on quantum mechanics.