Breaking the resilience of a two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate to fragmentation

A two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) split by a radial potential barrier is investigated. We determine on an accurate many-body level the system's ground-state phase diagram as well as a time-dependent phase diagram of the splitting process. Whereas the ground state is condensed for a wide range of parameters, the time-dependent splitting process leads to substantial fragmentation. We demonstrate for the first time the dynamical fragmentation of a BEC despite its ground state being condensed. The results are analyzed by a mean-field model and suggest that a large manifold of low-lying fragmented excited states can significantly impact the dynamics of trapped two-dimensional BECs.Comment: 5+eps pages, 4 figure

Fragmentation and correlations in a rotating Bose-Einstein condensate undergoing breakup

The theoretical investigation of rotating Bose-Einstein condensates has mainly focused on the emergence of quantum vortex states and the condensed properties of such systems. In the present work, we concentrate on other facets by examining the impact of rotation on the ground state of weakly interacting bosons confined in anharmonic potentials computed both at the mean-field level and particularly at the many-body level of theory. For the many-body computations, we employ the well-established many-body method known as the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree method for bosons (MCTDHB). We present how various degrees of fragmentation can be generated following the breakup of the ground state densities in anharmonic traps without ramping up a potential barrier for strong rotations. The breakup of the densities is found to be associated with the acquisition of angular momentum in the condensate due to the rotation. In addition to fragmentation, the presence of many-body correlations is examined by computing the variances of the many-particle position and momentum operators. For strong rotations, the many-body variances become smaller than their mean-field counterparts, and one even finds a scenario with opposite anisotropies of the mean-field and many-body variances. Further, it is observed that for higher discrete symmetric systems of order k, namely three-fold and four-fold symmetry, breakup to k sub-clouds and emergence of k-fold fragmentation take place. All in all, we provide a thorough many-body investigation of how and which correlations build up when a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate breaks up under rotation

Competition between pairing and ferromagnetic instabilities in ultracold Fermi gases near Feshbach resonances

We study the quench dynamics of a two-component ultracold Fermi gas from the weak into the strong interaction regime, where the short time dynamics are governed by the exponential growth rate of unstable collective modes. We obtain an effective interaction that takes into account both Pauli blocking and the energy dependence of the scattering amplitude near a Feshbach resonance. Using this interaction we analyze the competing instabilities towards Stoner ferromagnetism and pairing.Comment: 4+epsilon pages, 4 figure

Wave chaos as signature for depletion of a Bose-Einstein condensate

We study the expansion of repulsively interacting Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) in shallow one-dimensional potentials. We show for these systems that the onset of wave chaos in the Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE), i.e. the onset of exponential separation in Hilbert space of two nearby condensate wave functions, can be used as indication for the onset of depletion of the BEC and the occupation of excited modes within a many-body description. Comparison between the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree for bosons (MCTDHB) method and the GPE reveals a close correspondence between the many-body effect of depletion and the mean-field effect of wave chaos for a wide range of single-particle external potentials. In the regime of wave chaos the GPE fails to account for the fine-scale quantum fluctuations because many-body effects beyond the validity of the GPE are non-negligible. Surprisingly, despite the failure of the GPE to account for the depletion, coarse grained expectation values of the single-particle density such as the overall width of the atomic cloud agree very well with the many-body simulations. The time dependent depletion of the condensate could be investigated experimentally, e.g., via decay of coherence of the expanding atom cloud.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figure

Optimal Monte Carlo Updating

Based on Peskun's theorem it is shown that optimal transition matrices in Markov chain Monte Carlo should have zero diagonal elements except for the diagonal element corresponding to the largest weight. We will compare the statistical efficiency of this sampler to existing algorithms, such as heat-bath updating and the Metropolis algorithm. We provide numerical results for the Potts model as an application in classical physics. As an application in quantum physics we consider the spin 3/2 XY model and the Bose-Hubbard model which have been simulated by the directed loop algorithm in the stochastic series expansion framework.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, replaced with published versio

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