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arXiv:cond-mat/0510584 · Physical Review A

Dissociation dynamics of a Bose-Einstein condensate of molecules

Michael W. Jack, Han Pu

Published Dec 29, 2005• 27 citations
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Abstract

An unstable condensate of diatomic molecules will coherently disassociate into correlated pairs of atoms. This dissociation process exhibits very rich quantum dynamics depending on the quantum statistics of the constituent atoms. We show that in the case of bosonic atoms Bose enhancement can lead to stimulated dissociation, whereas, in the case of fermions Pauli blocking of the available states and a buildup of coherence between molecules and atom pairs can give rise to incomplete dissociation of the molecules and transient association-dissociation oscillations.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.72.063625

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An unstable condensate of diatomic molecules will coherently disassociate into correlated pairs of atoms. This dissociation process exhibits very rich quantum dynamics depending on the quantum statistics of the constituent atoms. We show that in the case of bosonic atoms Bose enhancement can lead to stimulated dissociation, whereas, in the case of fermions Pauli blocking of the available states and a buildup of coherence between molecules and atom pairs can give rise to incomplete dissociation of the molecules and transient association-dissociation oscillations.
We develop a pairing mean-field theory to describe the quantum dynamics of the dissociation of molecular Bose-Einstein condensates into their constituent bosonic or fermionic atoms. We apply the theory to one-, two-, and three-dimensional geometries and analyze the role of dimensionality on the atom production rate as a function of the dissociation energy. As well as determining the populations and coherences of the atoms, we calculate the correlations that exist between atoms of opposite momenta, including the column density correlations in three-dimensional systems. We compare the results with those of the undepleted molecular field approximation and argue that the latter is most reliable in fermionic systems and in lower dimensions. In the bosonic case we compare the pairing mean-field results with exact calculations using the positive-PPP stochastic method and estimate the range of validity of the pairing mean-field theory. Comparisons with similar first-principle simulations in the fermionic case are currently not available, however, we argue that the range of validity of the present approach should be broader for fermions than for bosons in the regime where Pauli blocking prevents complete depletion of the molecular condensate.
We study the effect of dephasing on the coherent dissociation dynamics of an atom-molecule Bose-Einstein condensate. We show that when phase-noise intensity is strong with respect to the inverse correlation time of the stimulated process, dissociation is suppressed via a Bose enhanced quantum Zeno effect. This is complementary to the quantum Zeno control of phase-diffusion in a bimodal condensate by symmetric noise [Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 220403 (2008)] in that the controlled process here is phase formation and the required decoherence mechanism for its suppression is purely phase noise.
We investigate the quantum many-body dynamics of dissociation of a Bose-Einstein condensate of molecular dimers into pairs of constituent bosonic atoms and analyze the resulting atom-atom correlations. The quantum fields of both the molecules and atoms are simulated from first principles in three dimensions using the positive-PPP representation method. This allows us to provide an exact treatment of the molecular field depletion and sss-wave scattering interactions between the particles, as well as to extend the analysis to nonuniform systems. In the simplest uniform case, we find that the major source of atom-atom decorrelation is atom-atom recombination which produces molecules outside the initially occupied condensate mode. The unwanted molecules are formed from dissociated atom pairs with nonopposite momenta. The net effect of this process---which becomes increasingly significant for dissociation durations corresponding to more than about 40% conversion---is to reduce the atom-atom correlations. In addition, for nonuniform systems we find that mode mixing due to inhomogeneity can result in further degradation of the correlation signal. We characterize the correlation strength via the degree of squeezing of particle number-difference fluctuations in a certain momentum-space volume and show that the correlation strength can be increased if the signals are binned into larger counting volumes.
The dissociation of a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate into its constituent particles is a process analogous to parametric down-conversion in optics. However, there is additional interest in the fact that the particles are massive, and may obey either bosonic or fermionic statistics. We describe a pairing mean-field theory related to the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov approach, and apply it to analyse the correlations present in recent experiments. We also perform calculations using stochastic phase-space methods for the bosonic case and compare the results of the two methods.
We demonstrate that the quantum dynamics of a many-body Fermi-Bose system can be simulated using a Gaussian phase-space representation method. In particular, we consider the application of the mixed fermion-boson model to ultracold quantum gases and simulate the dynamics of dissociation of a Bose-Einstein condensate of bosonic dimers into pairs of fermionic atoms. We quantify deviations of atom-atom pair correlations from Wick's factorization scheme, and show that atom-molecule and molecule-molecule correlations grow with time, in clear departures from pairing mean-field theories. As a first-principles approach, the method provides benchmarking of approximate approaches and can be used to validate dynamical probes for characterizing strongly correlated phases of fermionic systems.