Condensate fragmentation as a sensitive measure of the quantum many-body behavior of bosons with long-range interactions

The occupation of more than one single-particle state and hence the emergence of fragmentation is a many-body phenomenon universal to systems of spatially confined interacting bosons. In the present study, we investigate the effect of the range of the interparticle interactions on the fragmentation degree of one- and two-dimensional systems. We solve the full many-body Schr\"odinger equation of the system using the recursive implementation of the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree for bosons method, R-MCTDHB. The dependence of the degree of fragmentation on dimensionality, particle number, areal or line density and interaction strength is assessed. It is found that for contact interactions, the fragmentation is essentially density independent in two dimensions. However, fragmentation increasingly depends on density the more long-ranged the interactions become. The degree of fragmentation is increasing, keeping the particle number $N$ fixed, when the density is decreasing as expected in one spatial dimension. We demonstrate that this remains, nontrivially, true also for long-range interactions in two spatial dimensions. We, finally, find that within our fully self-consistent approach, the fragmentation degree, to a good approximation, decreases universally as $N^{-1/2}$ when only $N$ is varied.Comment: 8 pages of RevTex4-1, 5 figure

Phases, many-body entropy measures and coherence of interacting bosons in optical lattices

Already a few bosons with contact interparticle interactions in small optical lattices feature a variety of quantum phases: superfluid, Mott-insulator and fermionized Tonks gases can be probed in such systems. To detect these phases -- pivotal for both experiment and theory -- as well as their many-body properties we analyze several distinct measures for the one-body and many-body Shannon information entropies. We exemplify the connection of these entropies with spatial correlations in the many-body state by contrasting them to the Glauber normalized correlation functions. To obtain the ground-state for lattices with commensurate filling (i.e. an integer number of particles per site) for the full range of repulsive interparticle interactions we utilize the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree method for bosons (MCTDHB) in order to solve the many-boson Schr\"odinger equation. We demonstrate that all emergent phases -- the superfluid, the Mott insulator, and the fermionized gas can be characterized equivalently by our many-body entropy measures and by Glauber's normalized correlation functions. In contrast to our many-body entropy measures, single-particle entropy cannot capture these transitions.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, software available at http://ultracold.or

Decay modes of two repulsively interacting bosons

We study the decay of two repulsively interacting bosons tunneling through a delta potential barrier by direct numerical solution of the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation. The solutions are analyzed according to the regions of particle presence: both particles inside the trap (in-in), one particle in and one particle out (in-out), and both particles outside (out-out). It is shown that the in-in probability is dominated by exponential decay, and its decay rate is predicted very well from outgoing boundary conditions. Up to a certain range of interaction strength the decay of in-out probability is dominated by the single particle decay mode. The decay mechanisms are adequately described by simple models.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figure

How does an interacting many-body system tunnel through a potential barrier to open space?

The tunneling process in a many-body system is a phenomenon which lies at the very heart of quantum mechanics. It appears in nature in the form of alpha-decay, fusion and fission in nuclear physics, photoassociation and photodissociation in biology and chemistry. A detailed theoretical description of the decay process in these systems is a very cumbersome problem, either because of very complicated or even unknown interparticle interactions or due to a large number of constitutent particles. In this work, we theoretically study the phenomenon of quantum many-body tunneling in a more transparent and controllable physical system, in an ultracold atomic gas. We analyze a full, numerically exact many-body solution of the Schr\"odinger equation of a one-dimensional system with repulsive interactions tunneling to open space. We show how the emitted particles dissociate or fragment from the trapped and coherent source of bosons: the overall many-particle decay process is a quantum interference of single-particle tunneling processes emerging from sources with different particle numbers taking place simultaneously. The close relation to atom lasers and ionization processes allows us to unveil the great relevance of many-body correlations between the emitted and trapped fractions of the wavefunction in the respective processes.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures (7 pages, 2 figures supplementary information

Spectral Structure and Many-Body Dynamics of Ultracold Bosons in a Double-Well

We examine the spectral structure and many-body dynamics of two and three repulsively interacting bosons trapped in a one-dimensional double-well, for variable barrier height, inter-particle interaction strength, and initial conditions. By exact diagonalization of the many-particle Hamiltonian, we specifically explore the dynamical behaviour of the particles launched either at the single particle ground state or saddle point energy, in a time-independent potential. We complement these results by a characterisation of the cross-over from diabatic to quasi-adiabatic evolution under finite-time switching of the potential barrier, via the associated time-evolution of a single particle's von Neumann entropy. This is achieved with the help of the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree method for indistinguishable particles (\textsc{Mctdh-x}) -- which also allows us to extrapolate our results for increasing particle numbers.Comment: 20 pages, 14 figure

Orbital Josephson effect and interactions in driven atom condensates on a ring

In a system of ac-driven condensed bosons we study a new type of Josephson effect occurring between states sharing the same region of space and the same internal atom structure. We first develop a technique to calculate the long time dynamics of a driven interacting many-body system. For resonant frequencies, this dynamics can be shown to derive from an effective time-independent Hamiltonian which is expressed in terms of standard creation and annihilation operators. Within the subspace of resonant states, and if the undriven states are plane waves, a locally repulsive interaction between bosons translates into an effective attraction. We apply the method to study the effect of interactions on the coherent ratchet current of an asymmetrically driven boson system. We find a wealth of dynamical regimes which includes Rabi oscillations, self-trapping, and chaotic behavior. In the latter case, a full many-body calculation deviates from the mean-field results by predicting large quantum fluctuations of the relative particle number.Comment: Published versio