Creating highly entangled states with ultracolds bosonic atoms through resonance- and chaos-assisted tunneling

Dimitri R. Dounas-Frazer, Ann M. Hermundstad, Lincoln D. Carr

D. Steck, Mark G. Raizen

R. A. Kidd

Guillaume Vanhaele, Arnd Bäcker, Roland Ketzmerick +1 more

The authors propose a protocol for creating triple-NOON states with ultracold rubidium atoms subject to a periodic driving modulation that facilitates the collective tunneling of the atoms to the other sites. They show that chaos-assisted tunneling can reduce the collective tunneling time without significantly affecting the purity of the superposition.

Guillaume Vanhaele, Peter Schlagheck

We investigate theoretically the generation of microscopic atomic NOON states, corresponding to the coherent $|N,0\ensuremath{\rangle}+|0,N\ensuremath{\rangle}$ superposition with $N\ensuremath{\sim}5$ particles, via collective tunneling of interacting ultracold bosonic atoms within a symmetric double-well potential in the self-trapping regime. We show that a periodic driving of the double well with suitably tuned amplitude and frequency parameters allows one to substantially boost this tunneling process without altering its collective character. The timescale to generate the NOON superposition, which corresponds to half the tunneling time and would be prohibitively large in the undriven double well for the atomic populations considered, can thereby be drastically reduced, which renders the realization of NOON states through this protocol experimentally feasible. Resonance- and chaos-assisted tunneling are identified as key mechanisms in this context. A quantitative semiclassical evaluation of their impact on the collective tunneling process allows one to determine the optimal choice for the driving parameters in order to generate those NOON states as fast as possible.

W. K. Hensinger, Hartmut Häffner, Antoine Browaeys +7 more