Collective tunnelling of strongly interacting cold atoms in a double well potential

Abstract

It is known that under resonance conditions, a group of strongly interacting bosonic atoms, trapped in a double-well potential, mimics a single particle, performing Rabi oscillations between the wells. By implication, all atoms need to tunnel at roughly the same time, even though the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian accounts only for one-atom-at-a-time transfers. We analyse the mechanism of this collective behaviour, evaluate the Rabi frequencies in the process, and discuss the limitation of this simple picture. In particular, is is shown that the small rapid oscillations superimposed on the slow Rabi cycle, result from splitting the transferred cluster at the sudden onset of tunnelling, and disappear if tunnelling is turned on gradually.

10 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Negative quench induced excitation dynamics for ultracold bosons in one-dimensional lattices
• Correlated Tunneling Dynamics of an Ultracold Fermi-Fermi Mixture Confined in a Double-Well
• Quantum dynamical response of ultracold few boson ensembles in finite optical lattices to multiple interaction quenches
• Emergence of junction dynamics in a strongly interacting Bose mixture