English

Critical exponents for an impurity in a bosonic Josephson junction: Position measurement as a phase transition

Quantum Gases 2014-12-22 v2

Abstract

We use fidelity susceptibility to calculate quantum critical scaling exponents for a system consisting of NN identical bosons interacting with a single impurity atom in a double well potential (bosonic Josephson junction). Above a critical value of the boson-impurity interaction energy there is a spontaneous breaking of Z2\mathbb{Z}_2 symmetry corresponding to a second order quantum phase transition from a balanced to an imbalanced number of particles in either the left or right hand well. We show that the exponents match those in the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick and Dicke models suggesting that the impurity model is in the same universality class. The phase transition can be interpreted as a measurement of the position of the impurity by the bosons.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1410.0077,
  title  = {Critical exponents for an impurity in a bosonic Josephson junction: Position measurement as a phase transition},
  author = {J. Mumford and D. H. J. O'Dell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1410.0077},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

9 pages, 5 figures