A rotating quantum system without angular momentum and shape deformations

Abstract

The free translational dynamics of an n-body quantum system has many applications, e.g. in molecular and nuclei systems, where it is common to classify the degrees of freedom of the system in 3 rotational and 3n - 6 shape coordinates. It is known that there exists an interaction between the shape and orientation degrees of freedom. In particular, changes of the shape could induce an orientation change. In this work, it is shown a rotating quantum system which does not deform its shape probability density and with vanishing angular momentum. The orientation change is monitored with a localized orientation wavefunction. We characterize the localized wavefunctions and study their evolution under a rigid rotor-like Hamiltonian, concluding that this kind of wavefunctions may rotate by their own.