Many-body quantum coherence and interaction blockade in Josephson-linked Bose-Einstein condensates

¹  Nonlinear Physics Center and ARC Center of Excellence for Quantum-Atom Optics, Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, Australian National University - Canberra ACT 0200, Australia
²  Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics - P.O. Box 100088, Beijing, PRC

Corresponding author: chl124@rsphysse.anu.edu.au

Received: 3 October 2007
Accepted: 30 January 2008

Abstract

We study many-body quantum coherence and interaction blockade in two Josephson-linked Bose-Einstein condensates. We introduce universal operators for characterizing many-body coherence without limitations on the system symmetry and total particle number N. We reproduce the results for both coherence fluctuations and number squeezing in symmetric systems of large N, and reveal several peculiar phenomena that may occur in asymmetric systems and systems of small N. For asymmetric systems, we show that, due to an interplay between asymmetry and inter-particle interaction, the coherence fluctuations are suppressed dramatically when E_C/E_J≪ 1, and both resonant tunneling and interaction blockade take place for large values of E_C/E_J, where E_C and E_J are the interaction and tunneling energies, respectively. We emphasize that the resonant tunneling and interaction blockade may allow creating single-atom devices with promising technology applications. We demonstrate that for the systems at finite temperatures the formation of self-trapped states causes an anomalous behavior.