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Physical Review A

Splitting a trap containing a Bose-Einstein condensate: Atom number fluctuations

Juha Javanainen, Misha Ivanov

Published Sep 1, 1999• 163 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We theoretically study atom number fluctuations between the halves of a double-well trap containing a Bose-Einstein condensate. The basic tool is the two-mode approximation, which assumes that only two one-particle states are involved. An analytical harmonic-oscillator-like model is developed and verified numerically for both stationary fluctuations in the ground state of the system, and for the fluctuations resulting from splitting of a single trap by dynamically erecting a barrier in the middle. With increasing strength of the atom-atom interactions and/or increasing height of the potential barrier, the fluctuations tend to evolve from Poissonian to sub-Poissonian. Limits of validity of the two-mode model and its relations to the phase-atom-number approach of Leggett and Sols [A. J. Leggett and F. Sols, Found. Phys. 21, 353 (1991)] are discussed in detail.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.60.2351

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We theoretically study atom number fluctuations between the halves of a double-well trap containing a Bose-Einstein condensate. The basic tool is the two-mode approximation, which assumes that only two one-particle states are involved. An analytical harmonic-oscillator-like model is developed and verified numerically for both stationary fluctuations in the ground state of the system, and for the fluctuations resulting from splitting of a single trap by dynamically erecting a barrier in the middle. With increasing strength of the atom-atom interactions and/or increasing height of the potential barrier, the fluctuations tend to evolve from Poissonian to sub-Poissonian. Limits of validity of the two-mode model and its relations to the phase-atom-number approach of Leggett and Sols [A. J. Leggett and F. Sols, Found. Phys. 21, 353 (1991)] are discussed in detail.
We discuss Bose-Einstein condensation in harmonic traps where the confinement has undergone a splitting along one direction. We mostly consider three-dimensional potentials consisting of two cylindrical wells separated a distance 2a2a2a along the z axis. For ideal gases, the thermodynamics of the confined bosons has been investigated, performing exact numerical summations to describe the major details of the transition and comparing the results with the semiclassical density-of-states approximation. We find that for large particle number and increasing well separation, the condensation temperature evolves from the thermodynamic limit value Tc(0)(N){T}_{c}^{(0)}(N)Tc(0)​(N) to Tc(0)(N/2).{T}_{c}^{(0)}(N/2).Tc(0)​(N/2). The effects of adding a repulsive interaction between atoms has been examined resorting to the Gross-Pitaevskii-Popov procedure, and it is found that the shift of the condensation temperature exhibits different signs according to the separation between wells. In particular, for sufficiently large splitting, the trend opposes the well-known results for harmonic traps, since the critical temperature appears to increase with growing repulsion strength.
By using a two-mode description, we show that there exist the multistability, phase transition and associated critical fluctuations in the macroscopic tunnelling process between the halves of a double-well trap containing a Bose–Einstein condensate. The phase transition that two of the triple stable states and an unstable state merge into one stable state or a reverse process takes place whenever the ratio of the mean field energy per particle to the tunnelling energy goes across a critical value of order one. The critical fluctuation phenomenon corresponds to squeezed states for the phase difference between the two wells accompanying with large fluctuations of atom numbers.
By using a two-mode description, we show that there exist the multistability, phase transition and associatedcritical fluctuations in the macroscopic tunnelling process between the halves of a double-well trap containing a Bose-Einstein condensate. The phase transition that two of the triple stable states and an unstable state merge into one stablestate or a reverse process takes place whenever the ratio of the mean field energy per particle to the tunnelling energygoes across a critical value of order one. The critical fluctuation phenomenon corresponds to squeezed states for thephase difference between the two wells accompanying with large fluctuations of atom numbers.
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.
We study the splitting of a harmonically trapped atomic Bose-Einstein condensate when we continuously turn up an optical lattice (or a double-well) potential. As the lattice height is increased, quantum fluctuations of atoms are enhanced. The resulting nonequilibrium dynamics of the fragmentation process of the condensate, the loss of the phase coherence of atoms along the lattice, and the reduced atom number fluctuations in individual lattice sites are stochastically studied within the truncated Wigner approximation. We perform a detailed study of the effects of temperature and lattice height on atom dynamics, and investigate the validity of the classical Gross-Pitaevskii equation in optical lattices. We find the atom number squeezing to saturate in deep lattices due to nonadiabaticity in turning up of the lattice potential that is challenging to avoid in experiments when the occupation number of the lattice sites is large, making it difficult to produce strongly number squeezed (or the Mott insulator) states with large filling factors. We also investigate some general numerical properties of the truncated Wigner approximation.
We study the dynamic process of splitting a condensate by raising a potential barrier in the center of a harmonic trap. We use a two-mode model to describe the phase coherence between the two halves of the condensate. Furthermore, we explicitly consider the spatial dependence of the mode funtions, which varies depending on the potential barrier. This allows us to get the tunneling coupling between the two wells and the on-site energy as a function of the barrier height. Moreover, we can get some insight into the collective modes that are excited by raising the barrier. We describe the internal and external degrees of freedom by variational ansatz. We distinguish the possible regimes as a function of the characteristic parameters of the problem and identify the adiabaticity conditions.