English

Coherent macroscopic quantum tunneling in boson-fermion mixtures

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2009-11-13 v1 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We show that the cold atom systems of simultaneously trapped Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC's) and quantum degenerate fermionic atoms provide promising laboratories for the study of macroscopic quantum tunneling. Our theoretical studies reveal that the spatial extent of a small trapped BEC immersed in a Fermi sea can tunnel and coherently oscillate between the values of the separated and mixed configurations (the phases of the phase separation transition of BEC-fermion systems). We evaluate the period, amplitude and dissipation rate for 23^{23}Na and 40^{40}K-atoms and we discuss the experimental prospects for observing this phenomenon.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0704.0650,
  title  = {Coherent macroscopic quantum tunneling in boson-fermion mixtures},
  author = {D. Mozyrsky and I. Martin and E. Timmermans},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0704.0650},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages, 3 figures