Stuttgart 2012 – scientific programme
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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 32: Ultra-cold atoms, ions and BEC I
Q 32.1: Invited Talk
Tuesday, March 13, 2012, 14:00–14:30, V7.02
Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling of Solitons in Bose-Einstein Condensates — •Lincoln D. Carr1,2 and Joseph A. Glick2,3 — 1Physikalisches Institut, Universität Heidelberg, Germany — 2Department of Physics, Colorado School of Mines, U.S.A — 3Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University, U.S.A.
We study the quantum tunneling dynamics of many-body entangled solitons composed of ultracold bosonic gases in 1D optical lattices. A bright soliton, confined by a potential barrier, is allowed to tunnel out of confinement by reducing the barrier width and for varying strengths of attractive interactions. Simulation of the Bose Hubbard Hamiltonian is performed with time-evolving block decimation. We find the characteristic 1/e time for the escape of the soliton, substantially different from the mean field prediction, and address how many-body effects like quantum fluctuations, entanglement, and nonlocal correlations affect macroscopic quantum tunneling; number fluctuations and second order correlations are suggested as experimental signatures. We find that while the escape time scales exponentially in the interactions, the time at which both the von Neumann entanglement entropy and the slope of number fluctuations is maximized scale only linearly.