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arXiv:1710.01739 · New Journal of Physics

Emergence of junction dynamics in a strongly interacting Bose mixture

R E Barfknecht, Angela Foerster, N T Zinner

Published May 22, 2018• 5 citations
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Abstract

We study the dynamics of a one-dimensional system composed of a bosonic background and one impurity in single- and double-well trapping geometries. In the limit of strong interactions, this system can be modeled by a spin chain where the exchange coefficients are determined by the geometry of the trap. We observe non-trivial dynamics when the repulsion between the impurity and the background is dominant. In this regime, the system exhibits oscillations that resemble the dynamics of a Josephson junction. Furthermore, the double-well geometry allows for an enhancement in the tunneling as compared to the single-well case.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/aac718

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We study the dynamics of a one-dimensional system composed of a bosonic background and one impurity in single- and double-well trapping geometries. In the limit of strong interactions, this system can be modeled by a spin chain where the exchange coefficients are determined by the geometry of the trap. We observe non-trivial dynamics when the repulsion between the impurity and the background is dominant. In this regime, the system exhibits oscillations that resemble the dynamics of a Josephson junction. Furthermore, the double-well geometry allows for an enhancement in the tunneling as compared to the single-well case.
Westudy the dynamics of a one-dimensional system composed of a bosonic background and one impurity in single- and double-well trapping geometries. In the limit of strong interactions, this system can be modeled by a spin chain where the exchange coefficients are determined by the geometry of the trap.Weobserve non-trivial dynamics when the repulsion between the impurity and the background is dominant. In this regime, the system exhibits oscillations that resemble the dynamics of a Josephson junction. Furthermore, the double-well geometry allows for an enhancement in the tunneling as compared to the single-well case.
In this thesis we study the dynamics of one-dimensional strongly interacting few-body systems. We present the theory which allows us to describe such systems as a spin chain where the exchange coefficients are determined by the trapping geometry, and comment on the experimental feasibility of these mod- els. We then proceed to apply our formalism to different dynamical problems, where the strength of the interactions between the atoms in the trap plays a fundamental role. We find that interesting effects - ranging from changes in magnetic correlations to impurity oscillations and spin-charge separation - arise in this context. Additionally, we perform studies of the static corre- lations and many-body dynamics of bosonic systems away from the strongly interacting limit.
Understanding how coherent quantum dynamics give way to correlation-dominated behavior in low-dimensional systems remains a central challenge in quantum many-body physics. Here, we investigate a one-dimensional Bose-Josephson junction confined in a box trap using the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree method for bosons (MCTDHB). By varying the interaction strength and initial population imbalance, we identify distinct dynamical regimes governed by the competition between coherence and correlation-induced fragmentation. Weak interactions support coherent Josephson oscillations, whereas increasing imbalance leads to damping. At intermediate interaction strength, varying only the initial imbalance induces a crossover from nearly pure coherent oscillations to many-body dephasing with collapse-and-revival dynamics, and ultimately to equilibration accompanied by strong fragmentation and the saturation of many-body observables. In the strongly interacting regime, the system enters a dynamical freezing regime characterized by pronounced fragmentation, well-separated particle-resolved density peaks, and strongly suppressed tunneling. A systematic comparison with the Bose-Hubbard model reveals excellent agreement in the weakly interacting regime, while progressively larger deviations emerge as higher-orbital occupations beyond the two-mode approximation become significant. These results provide a unified picture of the emergence and competition of coherence, many-body dephasing, equilibration, and dynamical freezing, while delineating the regime of validity of the Bose-Hubbard description.
We explore the interplay between tunneling and interatomic interactions in the dynamics of a bosonic Josephson junction. We tune the scattering length of an atomic ^{39}K Bose-Einstein condensate confined in a double-well trap to investigate regimes inaccessible to other superconducting or superfluid systems. In the limit of small-amplitude oscillations, we study the transition from Rabi to plasma oscillations by crossing over from attractive to repulsive interatomic interactions. We observe a critical slowing down in the oscillation frequency by increasing the strength of an attractive interaction up to the point of a quantum phase transition. With sufficiently large initial oscillation amplitude and repulsive interactions, the system enters the macroscopic quantum self-trapping regime, where we observe coherent undamped oscillations with a self-sustained average imbalance of the relative well population. The exquisite agreement between theory and experiments enables the observation of a broad range of many body coherent dynamical regimes driven by tunable tunneling energy, interactions and external forces, with applications spanning from atomtronics to quantum metrology.
We unravel the many-body dynamics of a harmonically trapped impurity colliding with a bosonic medium confined in a double well upon quenching the initially displaced harmonic trap to the center of the double well.We reveal that the emerging correlation dynamics crucially depends on the impurity-medium interaction strength allowing for a classification into different dynamical response regimes.For strong attractive impurity-medium couplings the impurity is bound to the bosonic bath, while for intermediate attractions it undergoes an effective tunneling.In the case of weak attractive or repulsive couplings the impurity penetrates the bosonic bath and performs a dissipative oscillatory motion.Further increasing the impurity-bath repulsion results in the pinning of the impurity between the density peaks of the bosonic medium, a phenomenon that is associated with a strong impurity-medium entanglement.For strong repulsions, the impurity is totally reflected by the bosonic medium.To unravel the underlying microscopic excitation processes accompanying the dynamics, we employ an effective potential picture.We extend our results to the case of two bosonic impurities and demonstrate the existence of a qualitatively similar impurity dynamics.
We investigate the tunneling dynamics of an ultracold bosonic impurity species which interacts repulsively with a second, larger Bose gas. Both species are held in a finite-sized quasi-one-dimensional box potential. In addition, the impurity bosons experience a periodic potential generated by an optical lattice. We initially prepare our binary mixture in its ground state, such that the impurities and Bose gas are phase separated and the impurities localize pairwise in adjacent sites of the periodic potential, by tuning the interaction strengths and the lattice depth correspondingly. The dynamics is initiated by suddenly lowering the repulsive interspecies interaction strength, thereby entering a different regime in the crossover diagram. For specific postquench interspecies interaction strengths we find that a single impurity tunnels first to the neighboring empty site and depending on the quench strength can further tunnel to the next-neighboring site. Interestingly, this effect is highly sensitive to the presence of the Bose gas and does not occur when the Bose gas does not interact with the impurity species throughout the dynamics. Moreover, we find that the tunneling process is accompanied by strong entanglement between the Bose gas and the impurity species as well as correlations among the impurities.