The single-atom box: bosonic staircase and effects of parity

Abstract

We have developed a theory of a Josephson junction formed by two tunnel-coupled Bose-Einstein condensates in a double-well potential in the regime of strong atom-atom interaction for an arbitrary total number $N$ of bosons in the condensates. The tunnel resonances in the junction are shown to be periodically spaced by the interaction energy, forming a single-atom staircase sensitive to the parity of $N$ even for large $N$. One of the manifestations of the staircase structure is the periodic modulation with the bias energy of the visibility of the interference pattern in lattices of junctions.

5 pages, 4 included figues, published version

References in corpus (4)

• Interference pattern and visibility of a Mott insulator
• Few-boson dynamics in double wells: From single-atom to correlated-pair tunneling
• Tunneling dynamics of few bosons in a double well
• Many-body quantum coherence and interaction blockade in Josephson-linked Bose-Einstein condensates