The chaotic coherent atomic tunneling between two periodically driven and weakly coupled Bose-Einstein condensates has been investigated. The perturbed correction to the homoclinic orbit is constructed and its boundedness conditions are established that contain the Melnikov criterion for the onset of chaos. We analytically reveal that the chaotic coherent atomic tunneling is deterministic but not predictable. Our numerical calculation shows good agreement with the analytical result and exhibits nonphysically numerical instability. By adjusting the initial conditions, we propose a method to control the unboundedness, which leads the quantum coherent atomic tunneling to predictable periodical oscillation.
We consider large rings of weakly coupled Bose-Einstein condensates, analyzing their transition to chaotic dynamics and loss of coherence. Initially, a ring is considered to be in an eigenstate, i.e., in a commensurate configuration with equal site fillings and equal phase differences between neighboring sites. Such a ring should exhibit a circulating current whose value will depend on the initial, nonzero phase difference. The appearance of such currents is a signature of an established coherence along the ring. If phase difference falls between $\ensuremath{\pi}/2$ and $3\ensuremath{\pi}/2$ and interparticle interaction in condensates exceeds a critical interaction value
uc, the coherence is supposed to be quickly destroyed because the system enters a chaotic regime due to inherent instabilities. This is, however, only part of the story. It turns out that chaotic dynamics and resulting averaging of circular current to zero are generally offset by a critical timescale
tc, which is almost two orders of magnitude larger than the one expected from the linear stability analysis. We study the critical timescale in detail in a broad parameter range.
In this paper, we discuss coherent atomic oscillations between two weakly coupled Bose–Einstein condensates that are energetically different. The weak link is notionally provided by a laser barrier in a (possibly asymmetric) multi-well trap or by Raman coupling between condensates in different hyperfine levels. The resultant boson Josephson junction dynamics is described by a double-well nonlinear Gross–Pitaevskii equation. On the basis of a new set of Jacobian elliptic function solutions, we describe the period of the oscillations as well as associated quantities and predict novel observable consequences of the interplay of the energy difference and initial phase difference between the two condensate populations.