5 research outputs found
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
Atom interferometry with trapped Bose-Einstein condensates: Impact of atom-atom interactions
Interferometry with ultracold atoms promises the possibility of ultraprecise
and ultrasensitive measurements in many fields of physics, and is the basis of
our most precise atomic clocks. Key to a high sensitivity is the possibility to
achieve long measurement times and precise readout. Ultra cold atoms can be
precisely manipulated at the quantum level, held for very long times in traps,
and would therefore be an ideal setting for interferometry. In this paper we
discuss how the non-linearities from atom-atom interactions on one hand allow
to efficiently produce squeezed states for enhanced readout, but on the other
hand result in phase diffusion which limits the phase accumulation time. We
find that low dimensional geometries are favorable, with two-dimensional (2D)
settings giving the smallest contribution of phase diffusion caused by
atom-atom interactions. Even for time sequences generated by optimal control
the achievable minimal detectable interaction energy is on
the order of 0.001 times the chemical potential of the BEC in the trap. From
there we have to conclude that for more precise measurements with atom
interferometers more sophisticated strategies, or turning off the interaction
induced dephasing during the phase accumulation stage, will be necessary.Comment: 28 pages, 13 figures, extended and correcte
Bose-Hubbard model with occupation dependent parameters
We study the ground-state properties of ultracold bosons in an optical
lattice in the regime of strong interactions. The system is described by a
non-standard Bose-Hubbard model with both occupation-dependent tunneling and
on-site interaction. We find that for sufficiently strong coupling the system
features a phase-transition from a Mott insulator with one particle per site to
a superfluid of spatially extended particle pairs living on top of the Mott
background -- instead of the usual transition to a superfluid of single
particles/holes. Increasing the interaction further, a superfluid of particle
pairs localized on a single site (rather than being extended) on top of the
Mott background appears. This happens at the same interaction strength where
the Mott-insulator phase with 2 particles per site is destroyed completely by
particle-hole fluctuations for arbitrarily small tunneling. In another regime,
characterized by weak interaction, but high occupation numbers, we observe a
dynamical instability in the superfluid excitation spectrum. The new ground
state is a superfluid, forming a 2D slab, localized along one spatial direction
that is spontaneously chosen.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figure