arXiv:1103.0669 · Physical Review B
Ring of BEC pools as a trap for persistent flow
Jacek Dziarmaga, Marek Tylutki, Wojciech Hubert Zurek
Abstract
Mott insulator-superfluid transition in a periodic lattice of Josephson junctions can be driven by tunneling rate increase. The resulting winding numbers $W$ of the condensate wave function decrease with increasing quench time in accord with the Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM). However, in very slow quenches, Bose-Hubbard dynamics rearranges the wave-function phase so that its random walk cools, $\overline{{W}^{2}}$ decreases and eventually the wave function becomes too cold to overcome potential barriers separating different $W$. Thus, in contrast with KZM, in very slow quenches $\overline{{W}^{2}}$ is set by random walk with ``critical'' step size, independently of ${\ensuremath{\tau}}_{Q}$. As our study requires use of the truncated Wigner approximation (TWA) over relatively long time intervals, we investigate the validity of TWA by comparing its predictions with exact calculations for suitably small quantum systems.