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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe & European Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/Europe-EQEC)

Adiabatic splitting and self-trapping of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a double-well potential

Carlo Ottaviani, V. Ahufinger, R. Corbalán, J. Mompart

Published Jun 1, 2009• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Bose Einstein condensates (BECs) in double well potentials have drawn a lot of attention for the possibilities they offer to study fundamental quantum mechanical effects at the macroscopic level as well as for potential applications like interferometry, high precision measurements or thermometry. In contrast to Josephson junctions realized in superconductors and superfluids, in BEC the interatomic interactions play a crucial role leading to anharmonic Josephson oscillations, if the initial population imbalance of the two wells is below a critical value, and to macroscopic quantum self-trapping i.e, inhibition of large amplitude Josephson oscillations above the threshold for the population imbalance. In this paper, a novel technique to adiabatically control of BEC in a double-well potential is proposed. The adiabatic dynamics of a BEC in a double well potential can be described in terms of a dark variable resulting from a combination of the population imbalance and the spatial atomic coherence.

DOI
10.1109/cleoe-eqec.2009.5194134

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Bose Einstein condensates (BECs) in double well potentials have drawn a lot of attention for the possibilities they offer to study fundamental quantum mechanical effects at the macroscopic level as well as for potential applications like interferometry, high precision measurements or thermometry. In contrast to Josephson junctions realized in superconductors and superfluids, in BEC the interatomic interactions play a crucial role leading to anharmonic Josephson oscillations, if the initial population imbalance of the two wells is below a critical value, and to macroscopic quantum self-trapping i.e, inhibition of large amplitude Josephson oscillations above the threshold for the population imbalance. In this paper, a novel technique to adiabatically control of BEC in a double-well potential is proposed. The adiabatic dynamics of a BEC in a double well potential can be described in terms of a dark variable resulting from a combination of the population imbalance and the spatial atomic coherence.
We show that the adiabatic dynamics of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in a double-well potential can be described in terms of a dark variable resulting from the combination of the population imbalance and the spatial atomic coherence between the two wells. By means of this dark variable, we extend, to the nonlinear matter-wave case, the recent proposal by Vitanov and Shore [Phys. Rev. A 73, 053402 (2006)] on adiabatic passage techniques to coherently control the population of two internal levels of an atom or molecule. We investigate the conditions to adiabatically split or transport a BEC as well as to prepare an adiabatic self-trapping state by the optimal delayed temporal variation of the tunneling rate via either the energy bias between the two wells or the BEC nonlinearity. The emergence of nonlinear eigenstates and unstable stationary solutions of the system as well as their role in the breaking down of the adiabatic dynamics is investigated in detail.
In this thesis, I present the first experimental implementation of a Josephson junction for Bose-Einstein condensates. The weak link between two BECs constitutes the nonlinear generalization of the well known Josephson junction of weakly-coupled superconductors that are separated by a thin insulating barrier. In our experiment, the required overlap of two macroscopic wavefunctions is provided by loading a BEC into an optical double well potential. It is realized by a superposition of a one-dimensional optical lattice with a focused laser beam optical dipole trap. The tunneling dynamics between the two potential wells exhibits two distinct dynamical regimes. For small initial population imbalances of the two wells we observe nearly sinusoidal Josephson tunneling oscillations, which are characterized by an oscillating population and relative phase. The situation changes drastically, if the initial population imbalance is chosen above a critical value. In this case, resonant tunneling between the two wells is prohibited because the difference between the on-site particle interaction energies in the two wells exceeds the tunneling energy splitting. As a consequence, the atomic distribution becomes self-locked and the relative phase evolves unbound in time. This regime of prohibited tunneling, which has no analogon in superconducting Josephson junctions, is called “macroscopic quantum self-trapping”.
Summary form only given. Dynamical control of the atomic tunneling between two Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC's) confined in a double-well potential is predicted to occur when laser pulses induce transition between one of the condensate state and the excited state which brings about phase shifts for the condensate wave function, leading to transition between macroscopic quantum self-trapping, which is a self-maintained population imbalance between two BEC's due to interatomic interaction, and large amplitude oscillations. We investigate this phenomenon for the case of a three-level system with two condensate states and an excited state.
Based on the mean-field approximation and a phase-space analysis, we discuss the dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) in a double-well potential. The condensates are found to be trapped in the time-dependent eigenstates of the effective Hamiltonian; we refer to this effect as time-dependent self-trapping of BECs. By comparison of this self-trapping with the adiabatic evolution, we find that adiabatic evolution beyond the traditional adiabatic condition can be achieved in BECs. Furthermore, the population imbalance of the BECs in the wells can be controlled by manipulating the atom-atom couplings and the driving field. The fixed points for the system are also calculated and discussed.
Dynamics of the repulsive Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) in a double-well trap is explored within the 3D time-dependent Gross–Pitaevskii equation. The model avoids numerous common approximations (two-mode treatment, time-space factorization, fixed values of the chemical potential and barrier penetrability, etc) and thus may provide a realistic description of BEC dynamics, including both weak-coupling (sub-barrier) and strong-coupling (above-barrier) regimes and their crossover. The strong coupling regime is achieved by increasing the number N of BEC atoms and thus the chemical potential. The evolution with N of Josephson oscillations (JO) and macroscopic quantum self-trapping (MQST) is examined and the crucial impact of the BEC interaction is demonstrated. At weak coupling, the calculations well reproduce the JO/MQST experimental data. At strong coupling with a significant overlap of the left and right BECs, we observe a remarkable persistence of the Josephson-like dynamics: the JO and MQST converge to a high-frequency JO-like mode where both population imbalance and phase difference oscillate around the zero averages.
We study the coherent atomic tunneling between two zero-temperature Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) confined in a double-well magnetic trap. Two Gross-Pitaevskii equations for the self-interacting BEC amplitudes, coupled by a transfer matrix element, describe the dynamics in terms of the interwell phase difference and population imbalance. In addition to the anharmonic generalization of the familiar ac Josephson effect and plasma oscillations occurring in superconductor junctions, the nonlinear BEC tunneling dynamics sustains a self-maintained population imbalance: a novel ``macroscopic quantum self-trapping'' effect.