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arXiv:1502.04889 · Physical Review A

Condensate fragmentation as a sensitive measure of the quantum many-body behavior of bosons with long-range interactions

Uwe R. Fischer, Axel U. J. Lode, B. Chatterjee

Published Jun 18, 2015• 74 citations
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Abstract

The occupation of more than one single-particle state, and hence the emergence of fragmentation, is a many-body phenomenon occurring for systems of spatially confined strongly interacting bosons. In the present study, we investigate the effect of the range of the interparticle interactions on the fragmentation degree of one- and two-dimensional systems in single wells. We solve the full many-body Schr\"odinger equation of the system using the recursive implementation of the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree for bosons method (R-MCTDHB). The dependence of the degree of fragmentation on dimensionality, particle number, areal or line density, and interaction strength is assessed. For contact interactions, it is found that the fragmentation is essentially density independent in two dimensions. However, fragmentation increasingly depends on density the more long ranged the interactions become. At fixed particle number $N$, the degree of fragmentation is increasing when the density is decreasing, as expected in one spatial dimension. We demonstrate that this, nontrivially, remains true also for long-range interactions in two spatial dimensions. We, finally, find that fragmentation in a single well is a mesoscopic phenomenon: Within our fully self-consistent approach, the degree of fragmentation, to a good approximation, decreases universally as ${N}^{\ensuremath{-}1/2}$ when only $N$ is varied.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.91.063621

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The occupation of more than one single-particle state, and hence the emergence of fragmentation, is a many-body phenomenon occurring for systems of spatially confined strongly interacting bosons. In the present study, we investigate the effect of the range of the interparticle interactions on the fragmentation degree of one- and two-dimensional systems in single wells. We solve the full many-body Schr"odinger equation of the system using the recursive implementation of the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree for bosons method (R-MCTDHB). The dependence of the degree of fragmentation on dimensionality, particle number, areal or line density, and interaction strength is assessed. For contact interactions, it is found that the fragmentation is essentially density independent in two dimensions. However, fragmentation increasingly depends on density the more long ranged the interactions become. At fixed particle number NNN, the degree of fragmentation is increasing when the density is decreasing, as expected in one spatial dimension. We demonstrate that this, nontrivially, remains true also for long-range interactions in two spatial dimensions. We, finally, find that fragmentation in a single well is a mesoscopic phenomenon: Within our fully self-consistent approach, the degree of fragmentation, to a good approximation, decreases universally as N\ensuremath−1/2{N}^{\ensuremath{-}1/2}N\ensuremath−1/2 when only NNN is varied.
We study zero-temperature quantum phase fluctuations in harmonically trapped one-dimensional interacting Bose gases, using the self-consistent multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree method. In a regime of mesoscopic particle numbers and moderate contact couplings, it is shown that the phase-fluctuating condensate is properly described as a fragmented condensate. In addition, we demonstrate that the spatial dependence of the amplitude of phase fluctuations significantly deviates from what is obtained in Bogoliubov theory. Our results can be verified in currently available experiments. They therefore provide an opportunity both to experimentally benchmark the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree method, as well as to directly observe, for the first time, the quantum many-body phenomenon of fragmentation in single traps.
Abstract The out-of-equilibrium quantum dynamics of an interacting Bose gas trapped in a one-dimensional asymmetric double-well potential is studied by solving the many-body Schrödinger equation numerically accurately. We examine how the gradual loss of symmetry of the confining trap affects the macroscopic quantum tunneling dynamics of the system between the two wells. In an asymmetric double well, the two wells are not equivalent anymore, say, the left well is deeper than the right one. Accordingly, we analyze the dynamics by initially preparing the condensate in both the left and the right wells. The dynamics of the system is characterized by the time evolution of a few physical quantities of increasing many-body complexity, namely, the survival probability, depletion and fragmentation, and the many-particle position and momentum variances. In particular, we have examined the frequencies and amplitudes of the oscillations of the survival probabilities, the time scale for the development of fragmentation and its degree, and the growth and oscillatory behavior of the many-particle position and momentum variances. There is an overall suppression of the oscillations of the survival probabilities in an asymmetric double well, except for resonant values of asymmetry for which the one-body ground state energy in the right well matches with one of the one-body excited states in the left well, thereby resulting in resonantly enhanced tunneling from the right well ground state. Overall, depending on whether the condensate is initially prepared in the left or right well, the repulsive inter-atomic interactions affect the survival probabilities differently. For a sufficiently strong repulsive interaction, the system is found to become fragmented. The degree of fragmentation depends both on the asymmetry of the trap and the initial well in which the condensate is prepared in a non-trivial manner. Furthermore, we show that the phenomenon of resonantly enhanced tunneling can be accompanied by a large degree of fragmentation (depletion) for the strong (weak) interaction. The many-particle position and momentum variances follow the density oscillations of the system in the asymmetric double well and bears prominent signatures of the degree of depletion or fragmentation, depending on the strength of the interactions. These quantities further exhibit a fine structure signifying a breathing-mode oscillation. Finally, a universality of fragmentation for systems made of different numbers of particles but the same interaction parameter is also found and its dependence on the asymmetry is investigated. The phenomenon is robust despite the asymmetry of the junction and admits a macroscopically-large fragmented condensate characterized by a diverging many-particle position variance. This is as far as one can get from the dynamics of the density in the junction.
The many-body Schr\"odinger dynamics of a one-dimensional bosonic Josephson junction is investigated for up to 10 000 bosons and long times. The initial states are fully condensed and the interaction strength is weak. We report on a universal fragmentation dynamics on the many-body level: systems consisting of different numbers of particles fragment to the same value at constant mean-field interaction strength. The phenomenon manifests itself in observables such as the correlation functions of the system. We explain this universal fragmentation dynamics analytically based on the Bose-Hubbard model. We thereby show that the extent to which many-body effects become important at later times depends crucially on the initial state. Even for arbitrarily large particle numbers and arbitrarily weak interaction strength the dynamics is many-body in nature and the fragmentation universal. There is no weakly interacting limit where the Gross-Pitaevskii mean field is valid for long times.
In this paper, the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree for bosons (MCTDHB) method is derived for the case of NNN identical bosons with internal degrees of freedom. The theory for bosons with internal degrees of freedom constitutes a generalization of the MCTDHB method that substantially enriches the many-body physics that can be described. We demonstrate that the numerically exact solution of the time-dependent many-body Schr\"odinger equation for interacting bosonic particles with internal degrees of freedom is now feasible. We report on the MCTDHB equations of motion for bosons with internal degrees of freedom and their implementation for a general many-body Hamiltonian with one-body and two-body terms, both of which may depend on the internal states of the considered particles and time. To demonstrate the capabilities of the theory and its software implementation integrated in the mctdh-x software, we apply MCTDHB to the emergence of fragmentation of parabolically trapped bosons with two internal states: we study the ground state of N=100N=100N=100 bosons as a function of the separation between the state-dependent minima of the two parabolic potentials. To quantify the coherence of the system, we compute its normalized first-order correlation function. We find that the coherence within each internal state of the atoms is maintained, while it is lost between the different internal states. This is a hallmark of a kind of fragmentation absent in bosons without internal structure. We term the emergent phenomenon ``composite fragmentation.''
We investigate the level population statistics and degree of coherence encoded in the single-particle density matrix of harmonically trapped low-dimensional [quasi-one-dimensional (quasi-1D) or quasi-two-dimensional (quasi-2D)] Bose gases with repulsive contact interactions. Using a variational analysis, we derive fragmentation of the condensate in the weakly confining directions into two (quasi-1D) and three (quasi-2D) mutually incoherent macroscopic pieces, upon increasing a dimensionless interaction measure beyond a critical value. Fragmented condensate many-body states in low-dimensional systems therefore occur well before the thermodynamic limit of infinite extension is reached, in which phase fluctuations of the matter wave field create an infinite number of nonmacroscopic fragments.
We solve the Schrödinger equation from first principles to investigate the many-body effects in the expansion dynamics of one-dimensional repulsively interacting bosons released from a harmonic trap. We utilize the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree method for bosons (MCTDHB) to solve the many-body Schrödinger equation at high level of accuracy. The MCTDHB basis sets are explicitly time-dependent and optimised by variational principle. We probe the expansion dynamics by three key measures; time evolution of one-, two- and three-body densities. We observe when the mean-field theory results to unimodal expansion, the many-body calculation exhibits trimodal expansion dynamics. The many-body features how the initially fragmented bosons independently spreads out with time whereas the mean-field pictures the expansion of the whole cloud. We also present the three different time scale of dynamics of the inner core, outer core and the cloud as a whole. We analyze the key role played by the dynamical fragmentation during expansion. A Strong evidence of the many-body effects is presented in the dynamics of two- and three-body densities which exhibit correlation hole and pronounced delocalization effect.