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arXiv:cond-mat/0608355 · Physical Review A

Quantum top inside a Bose-Einstein-condensate Josephson junction

I. Bausmerth, Uwe R. Fischer, Anna Posazhennikova

Published May 9, 2007• 15 citations
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Abstract

We consider an atomic quantum dot confined between two weakly coupled Bose-Einstein condensates, where the dot serves as an additional tunneling channel. It is shown that the thus-embedded atomic quantum dot is a pseudospin subject to an external torque, and therefore equivalent to a quantum top. We demonstrate by numerical analysis of the time-dependent coupled evolution equations that this microscopic quantum top is very sensitive to any deviation from linear oscillatory behavior of the condensates. For sufficiently strong dot-condensate coupling, the atomic quantum dot can induce or modify the tunneling between the macroscopic condensates in the two wells.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.75.053605

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We consider an atomic quantum dot confined between two weakly coupled Bose-Einstein condensates, where the dot serves as an additional tunneling channel. It is shown that the thus-embedded atomic quantum dot is a pseudospin subject to an external torque, and therefore equivalent to a quantum top. We demonstrate by numerical analysis of the time-dependent coupled evolution equations that this microscopic quantum top is very sensitive to any deviation from linear oscillatory behavior of the condensates. For sufficiently strong dot-condensate coupling, the atomic quantum dot can induce or modify the tunneling between the macroscopic condensates in the two wells.
We consider a system of three weakly coupled Bose-Einstein condensates and two atomic quantum dots embedded in the barriers between the condensates. Each dot is coupled to two neighboring condensates by optical transitions and can be described as a two-state system, or a pseudospin 1/2. Although there is no direct coupling between the dots, an effective interaction between the pseudospins is induced due to their coupling to the condensate reservoirs. We investigate this effective interaction, depending on the strengths of the dot-condensate coupling T and the direct coupling J between the condensates. In particular, we show that an initially ferromagnetic arrangement of the two pseudospins stays intact even for large T / J . However, antiferromagnetically aligned spins undergo peculiar “breathing” modes for weak coupling T / J <1, while for strong coupling the behaviour of the spins becomes uncorrelated.
We study an atomic quantum dot representing a single hyperfine ``impurity'' atom which is coherently coupled to two well-separated Bose-Einstein condensates, in the limit when the coupling between the dot and the condensates dominates the intercondensate tunneling coupling. It is demonstrated that the quantum dot by itself can induce large-amplitude Josephson-like oscillations of the particle imbalance between the condensates, which display a two-frequency behavior. For noninteracting condensates, we provide an approximate solution to the coupled nonlinear equations of motion which allows us to obtain these two frequencies analytically.
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”.
In this paper, we investigated theoretically the dynamic effect induced by nonlinear tunneling of two weakly linked Bose–Einstein condensates in an extended boson Josephson-junction model, in which the two-body interaction is extended to neighboring lattice sites in strong interaction regime. As a consequence the dynamic properties compared with the usual Josephson-junction model are crucially modified by the atom-pair tunneling, which leads to the macroscopic quantum-states of coherent relative-phase between two condensates seen to be effective Schrödinger cat states. The relative-phase is controllable by system parameters and thus can be used to realize the qubit in quantum computation.
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.
We consider coherent atomic tunneling between two weakly coupled Bose-Einstein condensates at T =0 in a double-well trap. The condensate dynamics of the macroscopic amplitudes in the two wells is modeled by two Gross-Pitaevskii equations (GPE) coupled by a tunneling matrix element. Analytic elliptic function solutions are obtained for the time evolution of the inter-well fractional population imbalance z(t) (related to the condensate phase difference) of the Boson Josephson junction (BJJ). Surprisingly, the neutral-atom BJJ shows (non-sinusoidal generalizations of) effects seen in charged-electron superconductor Josephson junctions (SJJ). The BJJ elliptic-function behavior has a singular dependence on a GPE parameter ratio Λ at a critical ratio Λ=Λc, beyond which a novel 'macroscopic quantum self-trapping' effect sets in with a non-zero time-averaged imbalance <z>≠0.