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arXiv:1307.4595 · Physical Review A

Quantum and thermal fluctuations in bosonic Josephson junctions

Bruno Juliá-Díaz, Alex D. Gottlieb, Joan Martorell, A. Polls

Published Sep 3, 2013• 10 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We use the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian to study quantum fluctuations in canonical equilibrium ensembles of bosonic Josephson junctions at relatively high temperatures, comparing the results for finite particle numbers $N$ to the classical limit that is attained as $N$ approaches infinity. We consider both attractive and repulsive atom-atom interactions, with special focus on the behavior near the $T=0$ quantum phase transition that occurs, for large enough $N$, when attractive interactions surpass a critical level. Differences between Bose-Hubbard results for small $N$ and those of the classical limit are quite small even when $N\ensuremath{\sim}100$, with deviations from the limit diminishing as $1/N$.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.88.033601

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Bosonic Josephson junctions can be realized by confining ultracold gases of bosons in multiwell traps and studied theoretically with the MMM-site Bose-Hubbard model. We show that canonical equilibrium states of the MMM-site Bose-Hubbard model may be approximated by mixtures of coherent states, provided the number of atoms is large and the total energy is comparable to kBT{k}_{B}TkB​T. Using this approximation, we study thermal fluctuations in bosonic Josephson junctions in the mean-field regime. Statistical estimates of the fluctuations of relative phase and number, obtained by averaging over many replicates of an experiment, can be used to estimate the temperature and the tunneling parameter or to test whether the experimental procedure is effectively sampling from a canonical thermal equilibrium ensemble.
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In this paper we consider a bosonic Josephson junction described by a two-mode Bose-Hubbard model, and we thoroughly analyze a quantum phase transition occurring in the system in the limit of infinite bosonic population. We discuss the relation between this quantum phase transition and the dynamical bifurcation occurring in the spectrum of the discrete self-trapping equations describing the system at the semiclassical level. In particular, we identify five regimes depending on the strength of the effective interaction among bosons, and study the finite-size effects arising from the finiteness of the bosonic population. We devote special attention to the critical regime which reduces to the dynamical bifurcation point in the thermodynamic limit of infinite bosonic population. Specifically, we highlight an anomalous scaling in the population imbalance between the two wells of the trapping potential, as well as in two quantities borrowed from quantum information theory, i.e., the entropy of entanglement and the ground-state fidelity. Our analysis is not limited to the zero-temperature case, but considers thermal effects as well.
We investigate the thermodynamic properties of a bosonic Josephson junction in the full quantum approach and, in particular, we concentrate in studying the thermal averages of one- and two-body properties below and above the transition from delocalized to self-trapped regimes. This temperature dependence is determined by using the fact that at equilibrium the microcanonical and canonical ensembles should be equivalent. To establish the robustness of the equilibrium state, we first study a one body property and show numerically that any arbitrary state localized in energy, when evolved, reaches a stationary or equilibrium state. Comparison among averages of one- and two-body properties in the microcanonical and canonical ensembles reveals discrepances, thus leading to non-equivalence among these ensembles. Such averages differences can be attributed to the fact that the Hilbert space of the system scales as its size N, and consequently, the entropy does not scale as N. We further find as a natural consequence of studying the finite bosonic Josephson junction in the two-mode Bose Hubbard context, that positive and negative temperatures are obtained. This result can be generalized for any finite optical lattice.
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We investigate the fully quantum evolution of the population imbalance in a perfectly symmetric Bose-Josephson junction modeled by a two-mode Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian, focusing on the validity of macroscopic quantum self-trapping beyond the mean-field theory. We show that for any finite number of particles, the exact quantum dynamics leads to the breakdown of macroscopic quantum self-trapping after a finite time, regardless of the initial state. Using the symmetries of the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian, we provide a mathematical demonstration of this result and analyze the spectral properties governing the dynamics. We identify a branching behavior in the eigenvalue differences and a nontrivial structure of the population-imbalance amplitudes. These features allow us to distinguish two clearly different dynamical regimes and to elucidate the mechanism leading to the emergence of a quasi–macroscopic quantum self-trapping regime for large particle numbers. These findings bridge the gap between mean-field predictions and exact quantum dynamics and provide insight into the emergence of classical nonlinear behavior from finite quantum many-body systems.