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Revista Mexicana de Física

Non-equivalence of the microcanonical and canonical ensembles in a bosonic Josephson junction

Luis Antonio González-García, Roberto Zamora-Zamora, R. Paredes

Published Aug 15, 2011• 0 citations

Abstract

We investigate the thermodynamic properties of a bosonic Josephson junction in the full quantum approach and, in particular, we concentrate in studying the thermal averages of one- and two-body properties below and above the transition from delocalized to self-trapped regimes. This temperature dependence is determined by using the fact that at equilibrium the microcanonical and canonical ensembles should be equivalent. To establish the robustness of the equilibrium state, we first study a one body property and show numerically that any arbitrary state localized in energy, when evolved, reaches a stationary or equilibrium state. Comparison among averages of one- and two-body properties in the microcanonical and canonical ensembles reveals discrepances, thus leading to non-equivalence among these ensembles. Such averages differences can be attributed to the fact that the Hilbert space of the system scales as its size N, and consequently, the entropy does not scale as N. We further find as a natural consequence of studying the finite bosonic Josephson junction in the two-mode Bose Hubbard context, that positive and negative temperatures are obtained. This result can be generalized for any finite optical lattice.

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We investigate the thermodynamic properties of a bosonic Josephson junction in the full quantum approach and, in particular, we concentrate in studying the thermal averages of one- and two-body properties below and above the transition from delocalized to self-trapped regimes. This temperature dependence is determined by using the fact that at equilibrium the microcanonical and canonical ensembles should be equivalent. To establish the robustness of the equilibrium state, we first study a one body property and show numerically that any arbitrary state localized in energy, when evolved, reaches a stationary or equilibrium state. Comparison among averages of one- and two-body properties in the microcanonical and canonical ensembles reveals discrepances, thus leading to non-equivalence among these ensembles. Such averages differences can be attributed to the fact that the Hilbert space of the system scales as its size N, and consequently, the entropy does not scale as N. We further find as a natural consequence of studying the finite bosonic Josephson junction in the two-mode Bose Hubbard context, that positive and negative temperatures are obtained. This result can be generalized for any finite optical lattice.

Bosonic Josephson junctions can be realized by confining ultracold gases of bosons in multiwell traps and studied theoretically with the

M

-site Bose-Hubbard model. We show that canonical equilibrium states of the

M

-site Bose-Hubbard model may be approximated by mixtures of coherent states, provided the number of atoms is large and the total energy is comparable to

{k}_{B}T

. Using this approximation, we study thermal fluctuations in bosonic Josephson junctions in the mean-field regime. Statistical estimates of the fluctuations of relative phase and number, obtained by averaging over many replicates of an experiment, can be used to estimate the temperature and the tunneling parameter or to test whether the experimental procedure is effectively sampling from a canonical thermal equilibrium ensemble.

We investigate the finite-temperature properties of a bosonic Josephson junction composed of N interacting atoms confined by a quasi-one-dimensional asymmetric double-well potential, modeled by the two-site Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian. We compute numerically the spectral decomposition of the statistical ensemble of states, the thermodynamic and entanglement entropies, the population imbalance, the quantum Fisher information, and the coherence visibility. We analyze their dependence on the system parameters, showing in particular how finite temperature and on-site energy asymmetry affect the entanglement and coherence properties of the system. Moreover, starting from a quantum phase model which accurately describes the system over a wide range of interactions, we develop a reliable description of the strong tunneling regime, where thermal averages may be computed analytically using a modified Boltzmann weight involving an effective temperature. We discuss the possibility of applying this effective description to other models in suitable regimes.

In this paper we consider a bosonic Josephson junction described by a two-mode Bose-Hubbard model, and we thoroughly analyze a quantum phase transition occurring in the system in the limit of infinite bosonic population. We discuss the relation between this quantum phase transition and the dynamical bifurcation occurring in the spectrum of the discrete self-trapping equations describing the system at the semiclassical level. In particular, we identify five regimes depending on the strength of the effective interaction among bosons, and study the finite-size effects arising from the finiteness of the bosonic population. We devote special attention to the critical regime which reduces to the dynamical bifurcation point in the thermodynamic limit of infinite bosonic population. Specifically, we highlight an anomalous scaling in the population imbalance between the two wells of the trapping potential, as well as in two quantities borrowed from quantum information theory, i.e., the entropy of entanglement and the ground-state fidelity. Our analysis is not limited to the zero-temperature case, but considers thermal effects as well.

We use the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian to study quantum fluctuations in canonical equilibrium ensembles of bosonic Josephson junctions at relatively high temperatures, comparing the results for finite particle numbers

N

to the classical limit that is attained as

N

approaches infinity. We consider both attractive and repulsive atom-atom interactions, with special focus on the behavior near the

T=0

quantum phase transition that occurs, for large enough

N

, when attractive interactions surpass a critical level. Differences between Bose-Hubbard results for small

N

and those of the classical limit are quite small even when $N\ensuremath{\sim}100$, with deviations from the limit diminishing as

1/N

.

We investigate how the temperature calculated from the microcanonical entropy compares with the canonical temperature for finite isolated quantum systems. We concentrate on systems with sizes that make them accessible to numerical exact diagonalization. We thus characterize the deviations from ensemble equivalence at finite sizes. We describe multiple ways to compute the microcanonical entropy and present numerical results for the entropy and temperature computed in these various ways. We show that using an energy window whose width has a particular energy dependence results in a temperature with minimal deviations from the canonical temperature.

We study mathematically the equilibrium properties of the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian in the limit of a vanishing hopping amplitude. This system conserves the energy and the number of particles. We establish the equivalence between the microcanonical and the grand-canonical ensembles for all allowed values of the density of particles ρ and density of energy ε. Moreover, given ρ, we show that the system undergoes a transition as ε increases, from a usual positive temperature state to the infinite temperature state where a macroscopic excess of energy condensates on a single site. Analogous results have been obtained by S. Chatterjee (2017) for a closely related model. We introduce here a different method to tackle this problem, hoping that it reflects more directly the basic understanding stemming from statistical mechanics. We discuss also how, and in which sense, the condensation of energy leads to a glassy dynamics.