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Physical Review A

Ground state and excitations of a Bose gas: From a harmonic trap to a double well

Yonathan Japha, Y. B. Band

Published Sep 23, 2011• 13 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.84.033630

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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 low energy properties of a trapped bose gas split by a potential barrier are determined over the whole range of barrier heights. We derive a self-consistent two-mode model which reduces, for large NNN, to a Bogoliubov model for low barriers and to a Josephson model for any (asymmetric) double well potential, with explicitly calculated tunneling and pair interaction parameters. We compare the numerical results to analytical results that precisely specify the role of number squeezing and finite temperatures in the loss of coherence.
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).
We study the ground state for many interacting bosons in a double-well potential, in a joint limit where the particle number and the distance between the potential wells both go to infinity.Two single-particle orbitals (one for each well) are macroscopically occupied, and we are concerned with deriving the corresponding effective Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian.We prove an energy expansion, including the two-mode Bose-Hubbard energy and two independent Bogoliubov corrections (one for each potential well), and a variance bound for the number of particles falling inside each potential well.The latter is a signature of a correlated ground state in that it violates the central limit theorem.1. Introduction 1885 2. Main statements 1889 3. Mapping to the space of excitations 1897 4. Bounds on the two-mode Hamiltonian 1903 5. Derivation of the Bogoliubov Hamiltonian and reduction to right and left modes 1910 6.A priori estimates on the ground state of H N 1926 7. Shifted Hamiltonians and lower bound 1932 8. Proof of the main results 1939 Appendix A. The one-body Hartree problem 1949 Appendix B. Estimates and identities in the two-mode space 1951
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.
The density of states of a Bose-condensed gas confined in a harmonic trap is investigated. The predictions of Bogoliubov theory are compared with those of Hartree-Fock theory and of the hydrodynamic model. We show that the Hartree-Fock scheme provides an excellent description of the excitation spectrum in a wide range of energy, revealing a major role played by single-particle excitations in these confined systems. The crossover from the hydrodynamic regime, holding at low energies, to the independent-particle regime is explicitly explored by studying the frequency of the surface mode as a function of their angular momentum. The applicability of the semiclassical approximation for the excited states is also discussed. We show that the semiclassical approach provides simple and accurate formulas for the density of states and the quantum depletion of the condensate.
Following the idea of the density-functional approach, we develop a generalized Bogoliubov theory of an interacting Bose gas confined in a one-dimensional harmonic trap by using a local chemical potential, calculated with the Lieb-Liniger exact solution, as the exchange energy. At zero temperature, we use the theory to describe collective modes of a finite-particle system in all interaction regimes from the ideal gas limit to the mean-field Thomas-Fermi regime and to the strongly interacting Tonks-Girardeau regime. At finite temperature, we investigate the temperature dependence of collective modes in the weak-coupling regime by means of a Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov theory with Popov approximation. By emphasizing the effects of finite particle number and nonzero temperature on collective-mode frequencies, we compare our results with a recent experimental measurement [E. Haller et al., Science 325, 1224 (2009)] and some previous theoretical predictions. We show that the experimental data are still not fully explained within current theoretical framework.