Macroscopic Superpositions of Phase States with Bose-Einstein Condensates

Abstract

Quantum superpositions of macroscopically distinguishable states having distinct phases can be created with a Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in a periodic potential. The experimental signature is contained in the phase distribution of the interference patterns obtained after releasing the traps. Moreover, in the double well case, this distribution exhibits a dramatic dependence on the parity of the total number of atoms. We finally show that, for single well occupations up to a few hundred atoms, the macroscopic quantum superposition can be robust enough against decoherence to be experimentally revealable within current technology.

References in corpus (3)

• Matter-wave interferometry in a double well on an atom chip
• Interference of an array of independent Bose-Einstein condensates
• Creation of resilient entangled states and a resource for measurement-based quantum computation with optical superlattices