We report on the experimental characterization of a spatially extended Josephson junction realized with a coherently-coupled two-spin-component Bose-Einstein condensate. The cloud is trapped in an elongated potential such that that transverse spin excitations are frozen. We extract the non-linear parameter with three different manipulation protocols. The outcomes are all consistent with a simple local density approximation of the spin hydrodynamics, i.e., of the so-called Bose-Josephson junction equations. We also identify a method to produce states with a well defined uniform magnetization.
The out-of-equilibrium quantum dynamics of an interacting Bose gas trapped in a 1D asymmetric double-well potential is studied by solving the many-body Schrodinger equation numerically accurately. We examine how the loss of symmetry of the confining trap affects the macroscopic quantum tunneling dynamics of the system between the two wells. In an asymmetric DW, the two wells are not equivalent anymore -the left well is deeper than the right one. Accordingly, we analyze the dynamics by initially preparing the condensate in both the left and the right well. We examined the frequencies and amplitudes of the oscillations of the survival probabilities, the time scale for the development of fragmentation and its degree, and the growth and oscillatory behavior of the many-body position and momentum variances. There is an overall suppression of the oscillations of the survival probabilities in an asymmetric double well. However, depending on whether the condensate is initially prepared in the left or right well, the repulsive inter-atomic interactions affect the survival probabilities differently. The degree of fragmentation depends both on the asymmetry of the trap and the initial well in which the condensate is prepared in a non-trivial manner. Overall, the many-body position and momentum variances bear the prominent signatures of the density oscillations of the system in the asymmetric double well as well as a breathing-mode oscillation. Finally, a universality of fragmentation for systems made of different numbers of particles but the same interaction parameter is also found. The phenomenon is robust despite the asymmetry of the junction and admits a macroscopically-large fragmented condensate characterized by a diverging many-body position variance.
We investigate the dynamics of bosonic atoms in elongated Josephson junctions. We find that these systems are characterized by an intrinsic coupling between the Josephson mode of macroscopic quantum tunneling and the sound modes. This coupling of Josephson and sound modes gives rise to a damped and stochastic Langevin dynamics for the Josephson degree of freedom. From a microscopic Lagrangian, we deduce and investigate the damping coefficient and the stochastic noise, which includes thermal and quantum fluctuations. Finally, we study the time evolution of relative-phase and population-imbalance fluctuations of the Josephson mode and their oscillating thermalization to equilibrium.
We extend a recent method to shortcut the adiabatic following to internal bosonic Josephson junctions in which the control parameter is the linear coupling between the modes. The approach is based on the mapping between the two-site Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian and a 1D effective Schrodinger-like equation, valid in the large $N$ (number of particles) limit. Our method can be readily implemented in current internal bosonic Josephson junctions and it improves substantially the production of spin-squeezing with respect to usually employed linear rampings.
We investigate an atomic ensemble of interacting bosons trapped in a symmetric double well potential in contact with a single tightly trapped ion which has been recently proposed [R. Gerritsma et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 080402 (2012)] as a source of entanglement between a Bose-Einstein condensate and an ion. Compared to the previous study, the present work aims at performing a detailed and accurate many-body analysis of such combined atomic quantum system by means of the ab-initio multi-configuration time-dependent Hartree method for bosons, which allows to take into account all correlations in the system. The analysis elucidates the importance of quantum correlations in the bosonic ensemble and reveals that entanglement generation between an ion and a condensate is indeed possible, as previously predicted. Moreover, we provide an intuitive picture of the impact of the correlations on the out-of-equilibrium dynamics by employing a natural orbital analysis which we show to be indeed experimentally verifiable.
Tunneling in a many-body system appears as one of the novel implications of quantum physics, in which particles move in space under an otherwise classically-forbidden potential barrier. Here, we theoretically describe the quantum dynamics of the tunneling phenomenon of a few intricate bosonic clouds in a closed system of a two-dimensional symmetric double-well potential. We examine how the inclusion of the transverse direction, orthogonal to the junction of the double-well, can intervene in the tunneling dynamics of bosonic clouds. We use a well-known many-body numerical method, called the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree for bosons (MCTDHB) method. MCTDHB allows one to obtain accurately the time-dependent many-particle wavefunction of the bosons which in principle entails all the information of interest about the system under investigation. We analyze the tunneling dynamics by preparing the initial state of the bosonic clouds in the left well of the double-well either as the ground, longitudinally or transversely excited, or a vortex state. We unravel the detailed mechanism of the tunneling process by analyzing the evolution in time of the survival probability, depletion and fragmentation, and the many-particle position, momentum, and angular-momentum expectation values and their variances. As a general rule, all objects lose coherence while tunneling through the barrier and the states which include transverse excitations do so faster. Implications are briefly discussed.