Vortex macroscopic superpositions in ultracold bosons in a double-well potential

Abstract

We study macroscopic superpositions in the orbital rather than the spatial degrees of freedom, in a three-dimensional double-well system. We show that the ensuing dynamics of $N$ interacting excited ultracold bosons, which in general requires at least eight single-particle modes and $\left(\genfrac{}{}{0ex}{}{N+7}{N}\right)$ Fock vectors, is described by a surprisingly small set of many-body states. An initial state with half the atoms in each well, and purposely excited in one of them, gives rise to the tunneling of axisymmetric and transverse vortex structures. We show that transverse vortices tunnel orders of magnitude faster than axisymmetric ones and are therefore more experimentally accessible. The tunneling process generates macroscopic superpositions only distinguishable by their orbital properties and within experimentally realistic times.

9 pages, 6 figures

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Physics of higher orbital bands in optical lattices: a review
• Many-body tunneling dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates and vortex states in two spatial dimensions
• Relaxation, chaos, and thermalization in a three-mode model of a BEC
• Impact of the transverse direction on the many-body tunneling dynamics in a two-dimensional bosonic Josephson junction
• Energy-level crossings and number-parity effects in a bosonic tunneling model
• Condensates in double-well potential with synthetic gauge potentials and vortex seeding
• Stationary states and quantum quench dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates in a double-well potential
• Controlling dynamical entanglement in a Josephson tunneling junction