1998/03/25 by Janne Ruostekoski, Dan F. Walls · 1 citation
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Strong Light-Matter Interactions #cond-mat #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.58.r50
published as Phys. Rev. A 58 (1998) R50 · 4 pages, RevTex, 5 postscript figures
arxiv created 1998/03/25 · openalex publication_date 1998/07/01 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study the dynamics of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a double-well potential in the two-mode approximation. The dissipation of energy from the condensate is described by the coupling to a thermal reservoir of noncondensate modes. As a consequence of the coupling, the self-locked population imbalance in the macroscopic quantum self-trapping decays away. We show that a coherent state predicted by spontaneous symmetry breaking is not robust and decoheres rapidly into a statistical mixture due to the interactions between condensate and noncondensate atoms. However, via stochastic simulations we find that with a sufficiently fast measurement rate of the relative phase between the two wells the matter wave coherence is established even in the presence of the decoherence.