Creation and detection of a mesoscopic gas in a non-local quantum superposition

Abstract

We investigate the scattering of a quantum matter wave soliton on a barrier in a one dimensional geometry and we show that it can lead to mesoscopic Schrödinger cat states, where the atomic gas is in a coherent superposition of being in the half-space to the left of the barrier and being in the half-space to the right of the barrier. We propose an interferometric method to reveal the coherent nature of this superposition and we discuss in details the experimental feasibility.

4 pages, 1 figure

References in corpus (3)

• Decoherence of matter waves by thermal emission of radiation
• Enhanced Quantum Reflection of Matter-Wave Solitons
• Coherently controlled entanglement generation in a binary Bose-Einstein condensate

Cited by in corpus (17)

• Sagnac Interferometry Using Bright Matter-Wave Solitons
• Bright matter-wave soliton collisions at narrow barriers
• Robust Mesoscopic Superposition of Strongly Correlated Ultracold Atoms
• Scattering bright solitons: quantum versus mean-field behavior
• Internal structure of a quantum soliton and classical excitations due to trap opening
• Bose-Einstein condensation of 85Rb by direct evaporation in an optical dipole trap
• Quantum theory of bright matter wave solitons in harmonic confinement
• Nonlocal quantum superpositions of bright matter-wave solitons and dimers
• Reproducible mesoscopic superpositions of Bose-Einstein condensates and mean-field chaos
• Ultracold bosonic scattering dynamics off a repulsive barrier: coherence loss at the dimensional crossover
• From short-time diffusive to long-time ballistic dynamics: the unusual center-of-mass motion of quantum bright solitons
• Spatial two-particle NOON-states in periodically shaken three-well potentials
• Breakdown of Anderson localization of interacting quantum bright solitons in a disorder potential
• Quantum bright solitons in the Bose-Hubbard model with site-dependent repulsive interactions
• Localization of solitons: linear response of the mean-field ground state to weak external potentials
• Relative and center-of-mass motion in the attractive Bose-Hubbard model
• Extracting atoms one by one from a small matter-wave soliton