Coherent macroscopic quantum tunneling in boson-fermion mixtures

Abstract

We show that the cold atom systems of simultaneously trapped Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC's) and quantum degenerate fermionic atoms provide promising laboratories for the study of macroscopic quantum tunneling. Our theoretical studies reveal that the spatial extent of a small trapped BEC immersed in a Fermi sea can tunnel and coherently oscillate between the values of the separated and mixed configurations (the phases of the phase separation transition of BEC-fermion systems). We evaluate the period, amplitude and dissipation rate for ${}^{23}$Na and ${}^{40}$K-atoms and we discuss the experimental prospects for observing this phenomenon.

4 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (18)

• Condensation of Pairs of Fermionic Atoms Near a Feshbach Resonance
• A quasi-pure Bose-Einstein condensate immersed in a Fermi sea
• Dynamics of collapsing and exploding Bose-Einstein condensates
• Experimental Study of the BEC-BCS Crossover Region in Lithium 6
• Quantum Superposition States of Bose-Einstein Condensates
• Controlled Collapse of a Bose-Einstein Condensate
• Observation of Feshbach resonances between two different atomic species
• Direct observation of growth and collapse of a Bose-Einstein condensate with attractive interactions
• Zero-temperature phase diagram of binary boson-fermion mixtures
• Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling of a Bose-Einstein Condensate with Attractive Interaction
• Single Atoms in an Optical Dipole Trap: Towards a Deterministic Source of Cold Atoms
• Magnetic control of the interaction in ultracold K-Rb mixtures
• Coherent Quasiclassical Dynamics of a Persistent Current Qubit
• Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling of a Bose Condensate
• Decay of Metastable States: Sharp Transition from Quantum to Classical Behavior
• Macroscopic quantum tunneling of two-component Bose-Einstein condensates
• Collapse of a Bose Condensate with Attractive Interactions
• Atom counting in ultra-cold gases using photoionisation and ion detection

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Stability of a BEC with Higher-order Interactions near a Feshbach Resonance
• Fermion-mediated interactions in a dilute Bose-Einstein condensate
• Universality in Ultra-Cold Few- and Many-Boson Systems
• Kinetics of the Phase Separation Transition in Cold-Atom Boson-Fermion Mixtures
• Excitation Spectrum and Momentum Distribution of Bose-Hubbard Model with On-site Two- and Three-body Interaction
• Quantum Nucleation and Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling in Cold-Atom Boson-Fermion Mixtures