Ground-state properties of artificial bosonic atoms, Bose interaction blockade and the single-atom pipette

Abstract

We analyze the ground-state properties of an artificial atom made out of repulsive bosons attracted to a center for the case that all the interactions are short-ranged. Such bosonic atoms could be created by optically trapping ultracold particles of alkali vapors; we present the theory describing how their properties depend on experimentally adjustable strength of ``nuclear'' attraction and interparticle repulsion. The binding ability of the short-range potential increases with space dimensionality - only a limited number of particles can be bound in one dimension, while in two and three dimensions the number of bound bosons can be chosen at will. Particularly in three dimensions we find an unusual effect of enhanced resonant binding: for not very strong interparticle repulsion the equilibrium number of bosons bound to a nuclear potential having a sufficiently shallow single-particle state increases without bound as the nuclear potential becomes less attractive. As a consequence of the competing nuclear attraction enhanced by the Bose statistics and interparticle repulsions, the dependence of the ground-state energy of the atom on the number of particles has a minimum whose position is experimentally tunable. This implies a staircase dependence of the equilibrium number of bound bosons on external parameters which may be used to create a single-atom pipette - an arrangement which allows the transport of atoms into and out of a reservoir, one at a time.

17 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Realization of Bose-Einstein condensates in lower dimensions
• All Optical Formation of an Atomic Bose-Einstein Condensate
• Transport of Bose-Einstein Condensates with Optical Tweezers
• A Quantum Tweezer for Atoms
• A white-light trap for Bose-Einstein condensates

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• Monotonicity of quantum ground state energies: Bosonic atoms and stars
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• Initializing a Quantum Register from Mott Insulator States in Optical Lattices
• Interacting bosons in a nearly-resonant potential well
• From spontaneous to explicit symmetry breaking in a finite-sized system: Bosonic bound states of an impurity
• Deconfinement and phase diagram of bosons in a linear optical lattice with a particle reservoir