We investigate the tunneling of ultracold atoms in optical traps by using the path-integral method. We obtain the decay rate for tunneling out of a single-well and discuss how the rate is affected by the level splitting caused by the presence of a second adjacent well. Our calculations show that the transition through the potential barrier can be divided into three regions: the quantum tunneling region, the thermally assisted region and the thermal activation region. The tunneling process is found to be a second-order transition. We also show that level splitting due to tunneling can increase the tunneling rate.
We investigate the tunneling of ultracold atoms in optical traps by using the path-integral method. We obtain the decay rate for tunneling out of a single-well and discuss how the rate is affected by the level splitting caused by the presence of a second adjacent well. Our calculations show that the transition through the potential barrier can be divided into three regions: the quantum tunneling region, the thermally assisted region and the thermal activation region. The tunneling process is found to be a second-order transition. We also show that level splitting due to tunneling can increase the tunneling rate.
We review our theoretical advances in quantum tunneling of Bose-Einstein condensates in optical traps and in microcavities. By employing a real physical system, the frequencies of the pseudo Goldstone modes in different phases between two optical traps are studied respectively, which are the crucial feature of the non-Abelian Josephson effect. When the optical lattices are under gravity, we investigate the quantum tunneling in the “Wannier-Stark localization” regime and “Landau-Zener tunneling” regime. We finally get the total decay rate and the rate is valid over the entire range of temperatures. At high temperatures, we show how the decay rate reduces to the appropriate results for the classical thermal activation. At intermediate temperatures, the results of the total decay rate are consistent with the thermally assisted tunneling. At low temperatures, we obtain the pure quantum tunneling ultimately. And we study the alternating-current and direct-current (ac and dc) photonic Josephson effects in two weakly linked microcavities containing ultracold two-level atoms, which allows for direct observation of the effects. This enables new investigations of the effect of many-body physics in strongly coupled atom-cavity systems and provides a strategy for constructing novel interference devices of coherent photons. In addition, we propose the experimental protocols to observe these quantum tunneling of Bose-Einstein condensates.
Abstract In quantum tunneling a particle with energy E can pass through a high potential barrier V(E) due to the wave character of the particle. Bose\|Einstein condensates can display very strong tunneling depending on the structure of the trap, which may be a double\|well or optical lattices. We employed for the first time to our knowledge the periodic instanton method to investigate tunneling of Bose\|Einstein condensates in optical lattices. Our results show that there are two kinds of tunneling in this system, Landau\|Zener tunneling between extended states of the system and Wannier\|Stark tunneling between localized states of the system, and that the latter is 1000 times faster than the former. We also obtain the total decay rate for a wide range of temperature, including classical thermal activation, thermally assisted tunneling and quantum tunneling. Our results agree with experimental data in references[1, 2].Finally, we propose an experimental protocol to observe this new phenomenon in future experiments. periodic instanton, Wannier\|Stark localization, Landau\|Zener tunneling, Wannier\|Stark tunneling
In recent experiments, carried out at the University of Heidelberg, tunneling rates of ultracold distinguishable fermions out of an optomagnetical trap have been measured. The fermions interact by a tunable short-ranged interaction,\nand the trap is asymmetric making the trapped quantum system\neffectively one-dimensional. In this thesis, a method for calculating the energy levels and tunneling rates of one and two interacting particles out of a very general onedimensional potential well is devised. The method is based on expanding the Schrodinger equation of the system in a complex-momentum basis. This is done utilizing the so-called Berggren completeness relation. Ultimately,\nthe basis expansion leads to a complex symmetric non-Hermitian eigenvalue problem for a large, dense matrix.\nThe general method is applied to a system of trapped, ultracold fermionic atoms in a setup that closely resembles the Heidelberg experiments. The short-ranged interaction is modeled as a point-interaction, and the trap potential\nis regularized at large distances from the interesting region. The obtained energies and decay rates are contrasted to results obtained using the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) approximation. Notable differences\ncan be observed, and these may be due to insufficiency of the WKB approximation to accurately describe the system in question.
The study of quantum tunneling dates back to the early days of quantum mechanics, and has been a major topic of investigation in both theory and experiment. In recent years, there has been significant effort to understand tunneling phenomena for systems that exhibit chaos in their classical counterpart [13,15,18,29,42]. In particular, tunneling was predicted for mixed systems where chaotic and stable regions are intermingled [14]. The tunneling in this case is between two stable regions (referred to as nonlinear resonances, or islands of stability) in the classical phase space. The classical transport between these islands is forbidden by “dynamical barriers” in phase space. In contrast, quantum tunneling can couple the two islands so that a wave packet oscillates coherently between the two symmetry-related regions. This phenomenon is called dynamical tunneling because it occurs in phase space, without a fixed potential barrier. In the case of a mixed phase space, the presence of the chaotic region can enhance the rate of dynamical tunneling, a phenomenon known as chaos-assisted tunneling [53]. In this chapter, we review our experimental observation of chaosassisted tunneling with ultracold cesium atoms [48-51]. We first give a brief overview of some basic concepts and of earlier work in order to provide a context for our results.
In this paper, we study the tunneling and traversal of ultracold two-level atoms through the potential induced by the vacuum cavity mode. In particular, we discuss the effects of off-resonant interaction between the cavity mode and atomic transition on tunneling time of the ultracold atoms through a high-Q mazer cavity. The phase time which may be considered as an appropriate measure of the time required for the atom to cross the cavity, exhibits some interesting features in the presence of off-resonant interaction. For example, switching between the sub and superclassical behaviors in phase time occurs for proper choice of detuning. Similarly, negative phase time appears for the transmission of atoms in both excited and ground states in the presence of off-resonant interaction.
We experimentally study tunneling of Bose-condensed ^{87}Rb atoms prepared in a quasibound state and observe a nonexponential decay caused by interatomic interactions. A combination of a magnetic quadrupole trap and a thin 1.3 μm barrier created using a blue-detuned sheet of light is used to tailor traps with controllable depth and tunneling rate. The escape dynamics strongly depend on the mean-field energy, which gives rise to three distinct regimes-classical spilling over the barrier, quantum tunneling, and decay dominated by background losses. We show that the tunneling rate depends exponentially on the chemical potential. Our results show good agreement with numerical solutions of the 3D Gross-Pitaevskii equation.