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arXiv:1501.03306 · New Journal of Physics

Fragmented condensation in Bose–Hubbard trimers with tunable tunnelling

Albert Gallemí, M. Guilleumas, Joan Martorell, R. Mayol, A. Polls, Bruno Juliá-Díaz

Published Jul 14, 2015• 37 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We consider a Bose–Hubbard (BH) trimer, i.e. an ultracold Bose gas populating three quantum states. The latter can be either different sites of a triple-well potential or three internal states of the atoms. The bosons can tunnel between different states with variable tunnelling strength between two of them. This will allow us to study; (i) different geometrical configurations, i.e. from a closed triangle to three aligned wells and (ii) a triangular configuration with a π -phase, i.e. by setting one of the tunnellings negative. By solving the corresponding three-site BH Hamiltonian we obtain the ground state of the system as a function of the trap topology. We characterize the different ground states by means of the coherence and entanglement properties. For small repulsive interactions, fragmented condensates are found for the π -phase case. These are found to be robust against small variations of the tunnelling in the small interaction regime. A low-energy effective many-body Hamiltonian restricted to the degenerate manifold provides a compelling description of the π -phase degeneration and explains the low-energy spectrum as excitations of discrete semifluxon states.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/17/7/073014

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We consider a Bose–Hubbard (BH) trimer, i.e. an ultracold Bose gas populating three quantum states. The latter can be either different sites of a triple-well potential or three internal states of the atoms. The bosons can tunnel between different states with variable tunnelling strength between two of them. This will allow us to study; (i) different geometrical configurations, i.e. from a closed triangle to three aligned wells and (ii) a triangular configuration with a π -phase, i.e. by setting one of the tunnellings negative. By solving the corresponding three-site BH Hamiltonian we obtain the ground state of the system as a function of the trap topology. We characterize the different ground states by means of the coherence and entanglement properties. For small repulsive interactions, fragmented condensates are found for the π -phase case. These are found to be robust against small variations of the tunnelling in the small interaction regime. A low-energy effective many-body Hamiltonian restricted to the degenerate manifold provides a compelling description of the π -phase degeneration and explains the low-energy spectrum as excitations of discrete semifluxon states.
The two-site version of the Bose-Hubbard model can be used as a simplified model of N bosons confined to two quantum wells. We study the behavior of low-temperature Bose-Einstein condensates as a function of the strength of the repulsive interactions between the bosons and of the size of the quantum-mechanical tunneling between the quantum wells. The ground-state of weakly interacting bosons tends to be one in which almost all particles are in the same quantum-mechanical state (‘Bose-Einstein Condensate’, or ‘BEC’). It is found that even very small amounts of interwell tunneling lead to a BEC, but that zero tunneling leads to two separate BECs, one in each well (‘fragmentation’). We study systematically the transition between a single BEC comprised of bosons in both wells, and a fragmented condensate consisting of two BECs, one for each well. Our analysis will use matrix computational methods to solve the Schrödinger equation of the two-well boson system, and obtain the energies and wavefunctions as eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the Hamiltonian matrix. We will compare the results obtained with previous analyses, and against analytical approximations developed for the limiting case of a large number of bosons (large N).
Experiments with ultracold atoms in optical lattice have become a versatile testing ground to study diverse quantum many-body Hamiltonians. A single-band Bose-Hubbard (BH) Hamiltonian was first proposed to describe these systems in 1998 and its associated quantum phase-transition was subsequently observed in 2002. Over the years, there has been a rapid progress in experimental realizations of more complex lattice geometries, leading to more exotic BH Hamiltonians with contributions from excited bands, and modified tunneling and interaction energies. There has also been interesting theoretical insights and experimental studies on “un- conventional” Bose-Einstein condensates in optical lattices and predictions of rich orbital physics in higher bands. In this thesis, I present our results on several multi- band BH models and emergent quantum phenomena. In particular, I study optical lattices with two local minima per unit cell and show that the low energy states of a multi-band BH Hamiltonian with only pairwise interactions is equivalent to an effec- tive single-band Hamiltonian with strong three-body interactions. I also propose a second method to create three-body interactions in ultracold gases of bosonic atoms in a optical lattice. In this case, this is achieved by a careful cancellation of two contributions in the pair-wise interaction between the atoms, one proportional to the zero-energy scattering length and a second proportional to the effective range. I subsequently study the physics of Bose-Einstein condensation in the second band of a double-well 2D lattice and show that the collision aided decay rate of the con- densate to the ground band is smaller than the tunneling rate between neighboring unit cells. Finally, I propose a numerical method using the discrete variable repre- sentation for constructing real-valued Wannier functions localized in a unit cell for optical lattices. The developed numerical method is general and can be applied to a wide array of optical lattice geometries in one, two or three dimensions.
The extended Bose-Hubbard model for a double-well potential with atom-pair tunneling is studied. Starting with a classical analysis we determine the existence of three quantum phases: self-trapping, phase-locking, and Josephson states. From this analysis we build the parameter space of quantum phase transitions between degenerate and nondegenerate ground states driven by the atom-pair tunneling. Considering only the repulsive case, we confirm the phase transition by the measure of the energy gap between the ground state and the first excited state. We study the structure of the solutions of the Bethe ansatz equations for a small number of atoms. An inspection of the roots for the ground state suggests a relationship to the physical properties of the system. By studying the energy gap we find that the profile of the roots of the Bethe ansatz equations is related to a quantum phase transition.
We determine the low-energy properties of a trapped Bose gas split in two by a potential barrier over the whole range of barrier heights and asymmetry between the wells. For either weak or strong coupling between the wells, our two-mode theory yields a two-site Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian with the tunneling, interaction, and bias parameters calculated simply using an explicit form of two mode functions. When the potential barrier is relatively low, most of the particles occupy the condensate mode and our theory reduces to a two-mode version of the Bogoliubov theory, which gives a satisfactory estimate of the spatial shape and energy of the lowest collective excitation. When the barrier is high, our theory generalizes the standard two-site Bose-Hubbard model into the case of asymmetric modes, and correctly predicts a full separation of the modes in the limit of strong separation of the wells. We provide explicit analytic forms for the number squeezing and coherence as a function of particle number and temperature. We compare our theory to other two-mode theories for bosons in a double well and discuss their validity in different parameter regimes.
The Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian capturing the essential physics of the arrays of interacting Bose-Einstein condensates is addressed, focusing on arrays consisting of two (dimer) and three (trimer) sites. In the former case, some results concerning the persistence of mean-field features in the energy spectrum of the symmetric dimer are extended to the asymmetric version of the system, where the two sites are characterized by different on-site energies. Based on a previous systematic study of the mean-field limit of the trimer, where the dynamics is exhaustively described in terms of its fixed points for every choice of the significant parameters, an interesting mapping between the dimer and the trimer is emphasized and used as a guide in investigating the persistence of mean-field features in the rather complex energy spectrum of the trimer. These results form the basis for the systematic investigation of the purely quantum trimer extending and completing the existing mean-field analysis. In this respect we recall that, similar to larger arrays, the trimer is characterized by a non-integrable mean-field dynamics featuring chaotic trajectories. Hence, the correspondence between mean-field fixed points and quantum energy levels emphasized in the present work may provide a key to investigate the quantum counterpart of classical instability.
In this paper, we have studied a class of Hamiltonians that generalizes the Bose–Hubbard (BH) model of interacting bosons to include p -particle hopping as well as the multi-body interactions . While the case of two-body interaction and single-particle tunneling is well known, it is interesting to examine whether the resulting phase diagram for the general case has different features from that of the standard BH system. To this end we have applied a mean-field theory to locate critical lines, combined with the resolvent and Laplace transform method for the efficient calculation of the statistical sum for the quantum Hamiltonian. We have studied both ground state properties and temperature evolution of the phase diagram. Several new features, as an expansion of Mott insulator lobes for multi-body interaction and the emergence of a new insulating plateau for , have been demonstrated. These results may be of interest for experiments on cold atom systems in optical lattices.