Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling Escape of Bose-Einstein Condensates
Abstract
Recent experiments on macroscopic quantum tunneling reveal a non-exponential decay of the number of atoms trapped in a quasibound state behind a potential barrier. Through both experiment and theory, we demonstrate this non-exponential decay results from interactions between atoms. Quantum tunneling of tens of thousands of 87 Rb atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate is modeled by a modified Jeffreys-Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin model, taking into account the effective time-dependent barrier induced by the mean-field. Three-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii simulations corroborate a mean-field result when compared with experiments. However, with one-dimensional modeling using time-evolving block decimation, we present an effective renormalized mean-field theory that suggests many-body dynamics for which a bare mean-field theory may not apply.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1705.04364,
title = {Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling Escape of Bose-Einstein Condensates},
author = {Xinxin Zhao and Diego A. Alcala and Marie A. McLain and Kenji Maeda and Shreyas Potnis and Ramon Ramos and Aephraim M. Steinberg and Lincoln D. Carr},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.04364},
year = {2017}
}