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arXiv:cond-mat/0011095

The Schrodinger Cat Family in Attractive Bose Gases and Their Interference

Tin-Lun Ho, Cristian V. Ciobanu

Published Nov 6, 2000• 1 citation
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Abstract

We show that the ground state of an attractive Bose gas in a double well evolves from a coherent state to a Schrodinger Cat like state as the tunneling barrier is decreased. The latter exhibits super- fragmentation as spin-1 Bose gas with antiferromagnetic interaction, which is caused by the same physics. We also show that the fragmented condensates of attractive and repulsive Bose gases in double wells lead to very different interference patterns.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.cond-mat/0011095

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We show that the ground state of an attractive Bose gas in a double well evolves from a coherent state to a Schrodinger Cat like state as the tunneling barrier is decreased. The latter exhibits super- fragmentation as spin-1 Bose gas with antiferromagnetic interaction, which is caused by the same physics. We also show that the fragmented condensates of attractive and repulsive Bose gases in double wells lead to very different interference patterns.
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 present a theoretical study of the ground state of a Bose-Einstein condensate with repulsive interparticle interactions in a double-well potential, using a restricted variational principle. Within such an approach, there is a transition from a single condensate to a fragmented condensate as the strength of the central barrier of the potential is increased. We determine the nature of this transition through an approximate analytic solution as well as a numerical solution of our model, in the regime where the interparticle interactions can be treated perturbatively. The degree of fragmentation of the condensate is characterized by the degrees of first- and second-order spatial coherence across the barrier.
We consider a Bose–Hubbard (BH) trimer, i.e. an ultracold Bose gas populating three quantum states. The latter can be either different sites of a triple-well potential or three internal states of the atoms. The bosons can tunnel between different states with variable tunnelling strength between two of them. This will allow us to study; (i) different geometrical configurations, i.e. from a closed triangle to three aligned wells and (ii) a triangular configuration with a π -phase, i.e. by setting one of the tunnellings negative. By solving the corresponding three-site BH Hamiltonian we obtain the ground state of the system as a function of the trap topology. We characterize the different ground states by means of the coherence and entanglement properties. For small repulsive interactions, fragmented condensates are found for the π -phase case. These are found to be robust against small variations of the tunnelling in the small interaction regime. A low-energy effective many-body Hamiltonian restricted to the degenerate manifold provides a compelling description of the π -phase degeneration and explains the low-energy spectrum as excitations of discrete semifluxon states.
Abstract The out-of-equilibrium quantum dynamics of an interacting Bose gas trapped in a one-dimensional asymmetric double-well potential is studied by solving the many-body Schrödinger equation numerically accurately. We examine how the gradual loss of symmetry of the confining trap affects the macroscopic quantum tunneling dynamics of the system between the two wells. In an asymmetric double well, the two wells are not equivalent anymore, say, the left well is deeper than the right one. Accordingly, we analyze the dynamics by initially preparing the condensate in both the left and the right wells. The dynamics of the system is characterized by the time evolution of a few physical quantities of increasing many-body complexity, namely, the survival probability, depletion and fragmentation, and the many-particle position and momentum variances. In particular, we have examined the frequencies and amplitudes of the oscillations of the survival probabilities, the time scale for the development of fragmentation and its degree, and the growth and oscillatory behavior of the many-particle position and momentum variances. There is an overall suppression of the oscillations of the survival probabilities in an asymmetric double well, except for resonant values of asymmetry for which the one-body ground state energy in the right well matches with one of the one-body excited states in the left well, thereby resulting in resonantly enhanced tunneling from the right well ground state. Overall, depending on whether the condensate is initially prepared in the left or right well, the repulsive inter-atomic interactions affect the survival probabilities differently. For a sufficiently strong repulsive interaction, the system is found to become fragmented. The degree of fragmentation depends both on the asymmetry of the trap and the initial well in which the condensate is prepared in a non-trivial manner. Furthermore, we show that the phenomenon of resonantly enhanced tunneling can be accompanied by a large degree of fragmentation (depletion) for the strong (weak) interaction. The many-particle position and momentum variances follow the density oscillations of the system in the asymmetric double well and bears prominent signatures of the degree of depletion or fragmentation, depending on the strength of the interactions. These quantities further exhibit a fine structure signifying a breathing-mode oscillation. Finally, a universality of fragmentation for systems made of different numbers of particles but the same interaction parameter is also found and its dependence on the asymmetry is investigated. The phenomenon is robust despite the asymmetry of the junction and admits a macroscopically-large fragmented condensate characterized by a diverging many-particle position variance. This is as far as one can get from the dynamics of the density in the junction.
The ground state and spectral properties of Bose gases in double-well potentials are studied in two different scenarios: (i) an interacting atomic Bose gas, and (ii) a mixture of an atomic gas interacting with diatomic molecules. A ground state second-order quantum phase transition is observed in both scenarios. For large attractive values of the atom-atom interaction, the ground state is degenerate. For repulsive and small attractive interaction, the ground state is not degenerate and is well approximated by a boson coherent state. Both systems depict an excited state quantum phase transition. In both cases, a critical energy separates a region in which all the energy levels are degenerate in pairs, from another region in which there are no degeneracies. For the atomic system, the critical point displays a singularity in the density of states, whereas this behavior is largely smoothed for the mixed atom-molecule system.