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arXiv:0811.2030 · Physical Review A

Comparative study of dynamical simulation methods for the dissociation of molecular Bose-Einstein condensates

S. L. W. Midgley, Sebastian Wüster, M. K. Olsen, Matthew J. Davis, Karen V. Kheruntsyan

Published May 20, 2009• 13 citations
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Abstract

We describe a pairing mean-field theory related to the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov approach, and apply it to the dynamics of dissociation of a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate into correlated bosonic atom pairs. We also perform the same simulation using two stochastic phase-space techniques for quantum dynamics---the positive-$P$ representation method and the truncated Wigner method. By comparing the results of our calculations we are able to assess the relative strengths of these theoretical techniques in describing molecular dissociation in one spatial dimension. An important aspect of our analysis is the inclusion of atom-atom interactions, which can be problematic for the positive-$P$ method. We find that the truncated Wigner method mostly agrees with the positive-$P$ simulations, but can be simulated for significantly longer times. The pairing mean-field theory results diverge from the quantum dynamical methods after relatively short times.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.79.053632

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We describe a pairing mean-field theory related to the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov approach, and apply it to the dynamics of dissociation of a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate into correlated bosonic atom pairs. We also perform the same simulation using two stochastic phase-space techniques for quantum dynamics---the positive-PPP representation method and the truncated Wigner method. By comparing the results of our calculations we are able to assess the relative strengths of these theoretical techniques in describing molecular dissociation in one spatial dimension. An important aspect of our analysis is the inclusion of atom-atom interactions, which can be problematic for the positive-PPP method. We find that the truncated Wigner method mostly agrees with the positive-PPP simulations, but can be simulated for significantly longer times. The pairing mean-field theory results diverge from the quantum dynamical methods after relatively short times.
We develop a pairing mean-field theory to describe the quantum dynamics of the dissociation of molecular Bose-Einstein condensates into their constituent bosonic or fermionic atoms. We apply the theory to one-, two-, and three-dimensional geometries and analyze the role of dimensionality on the atom production rate as a function of the dissociation energy. As well as determining the populations and coherences of the atoms, we calculate the correlations that exist between atoms of opposite momenta, including the column density correlations in three-dimensional systems. We compare the results with those of the undepleted molecular field approximation and argue that the latter is most reliable in fermionic systems and in lower dimensions. In the bosonic case we compare the pairing mean-field results with exact calculations using the positive-PPP stochastic method and estimate the range of validity of the pairing mean-field theory. Comparisons with similar first-principle simulations in the fermionic case are currently not available, however, we argue that the range of validity of the present approach should be broader for fermions than for bosons in the regime where Pauli blocking prevents complete depletion of the molecular condensate.
The dissociation of a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate into its constituent particles is a process analogous to parametric down-conversion in optics. However, there is additional interest in the fact that the particles are massive, and may obey either bosonic or fermionic statistics. We describe a pairing mean-field theory related to the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov approach, and apply it to analyse the correlations present in recent experiments. We also perform calculations using stochastic phase-space methods for the bosonic case and compare the results of the two methods.
We introduce an approximate phase-space technique to simulate the quantum dynamics of interacting bosons. With the future goal of treating Bose-Einstein condensate systems, the method is designed for systems with a natural separation into highly occupied (condensed) modes and lightly occupied modes. The method self-consistently uses the Wigner representation to treat highly occupied modes and the positive-PPP representation for lightly occupied modes. In this method, truncation of higher-derivative terms from the Fokker-Planck equation is usually necessary. However, at least in the cases investigated here, the resulting systematic error, over a finite time, vanishes in the limit of large Wigner occupation numbers. We tested the method on a system of two interacting anharmonic oscillators, with high and low occupations, respectively. The hybrid method successfully predicted atomic quadratures to a useful simulation time 60 times longer than that of the positive-PPP method. The truncated Wigner method also performed well in this test. For the prediction of the correlation in a quantum nondemolition measurement scheme, for this same system, the hybrid method gave excellent agreement with the exact result, while the truncated Wigner method showed a large systematic error.
We demonstrate that the quantum dynamics of a many-body Fermi-Bose system can be simulated using a Gaussian phase-space representation method. In particular, we consider the application of the mixed fermion-boson model to ultracold quantum gases and simulate the dynamics of dissociation of a Bose-Einstein condensate of bosonic dimers into pairs of fermionic atoms. We quantify deviations of atom-atom pair correlations from Wick's factorization scheme, and show that atom-molecule and molecule-molecule correlations grow with time, in clear departures from pairing mean-field theories. As a first-principles approach, the method provides benchmarking of approximate approaches and can be used to validate dynamical probes for characterizing strongly correlated phases of fermionic systems.
We investigate the quantum many-body dynamics of dissociation of a Bose-Einstein condensate of molecular dimers into pairs of constituent bosonic atoms and analyze the resulting atom-atom correlations. The quantum fields of both the molecules and atoms are simulated from first principles in three dimensions using the positive-PPP representation method. This allows us to provide an exact treatment of the molecular field depletion and sss-wave scattering interactions between the particles, as well as to extend the analysis to nonuniform systems. In the simplest uniform case, we find that the major source of atom-atom decorrelation is atom-atom recombination which produces molecules outside the initially occupied condensate mode. The unwanted molecules are formed from dissociated atom pairs with nonopposite momenta. The net effect of this process---which becomes increasingly significant for dissociation durations corresponding to more than about 40% conversion---is to reduce the atom-atom correlations. In addition, for nonuniform systems we find that mode mixing due to inhomogeneity can result in further degradation of the correlation signal. We characterize the correlation strength via the degree of squeezing of particle number-difference fluctuations in a certain momentum-space volume and show that the correlation strength can be increased if the signals are binned into larger counting volumes.
Abstract Phase-space methods allow one to go beyond the mean-field approximation to simulate the quantum dynamics of interacting fields. Here, we obtain a technique for initializing either Wigner or positive-P phase-space simulations of Bose–Einstein condensates with quantum states at a finite temperature. As a means to calculate the initial states, we introduce the idea of a nonlinear chemical potential, which removes the zero-momentum phase-noise divergences of Bogoliubov theory to give a diagonal Hamiltonian. The resulting steady-state quantum theory is then directly applicable to the calculations of initial conditions for quantum simulations of BEC dynamics using phase-space techniques. These methods allow efficient and scalable simulation of large Bose–Einstein condensates. We suggest that nonlinear chemical potentials may have a general applicability to cases of broken symmetry.