Many-body quantum ratchet in a Bose-Einstein condensate

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a dilute Bose-Einstein condensate confined in a toroidal trap and exposed to a pair of periodically flashed optical lattices. We first prove that in the noninteracting case this system can present a quantum symmetry which forbids the ratchet effect classically expected. We then show how many-body atom-atom interactions, treated within the mean-field approximation, can break this quantum symmetry, thus generating directed transport.

4 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Quasiperiodically driven ratchets for cold atoms
• Quantum ratchets in dissipative chaotic systems
• Dissipationless Directed Transport in Rocked Single-Band Quantum Dynamics

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Artificial Brownian motors: Controlling transport on the nanoscale
• Dynamics of matter-wave solitons in a ratchet potential
• Quantum Ratchets for Quantum Communication with Optical Superlattices
• Coherent ratchets in driven Bose-Einstein condensates
• Steering Bose-Einstein condensates despite time symmetry
• Dynamical instability in kicked Bose-Einstein condensates: Bogoliubov resonances
• Nonlinear resonances in δ-kicked Bose-Einstein Condensates