arXiv:1411.1632 · Physical Review A
Quasiparticle tunneling in a periodically driven bosonic Josephson junction
Bettina Gertjerenken, Martin Holthaus
Abstract
A resonantly driven bosonic Josephson junction supports stable collective excitations, or quasiparticles, which constitute analogs of the Trojan wave packets previously explored with Rydberg atoms in strong microwave fields. We predict a quantum beating effect between such symmetry-related many-body Trojan states taking place on time scales which are long in comparison with the driving period. Within a mean-field approximation, this quantum beating can be regarded as a manifestation of dynamical tunneling. On the full $N$-particle level, the beating phenomenon leads to an experimentally feasible, robust strategy for probing highly entangled mesoscopic states.