2008/03/31 by John Goold, J. Goold, Thomas Busch +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #cond-mat.other #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.77.063601
published as Phys. Rev. A 77, 063601 (2008) · 7 pages, 10 figures.New Fig. 8 added and text reference to figure in Sec IV C. New reference [15] added
openalex publication_date 2008/06/02 · arxiv created 2008/07/04 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
We determine the exact many-body properties of a bosonic Tonks-Girardeau gas confined in a harmonic potential with a tunable \ensuremathδ-function barrier at the trap center. This is done by calculating the reduced single-particle density matrix, the pair-distribution function, and the momentum distribution of the gas as a function of barrier strength and particle number. With increasing barrier height we find that the ground-state occupation in a diagonal basis diverges from the √(N) behavior that is expected for the case of a simple harmonic trap. In fact, the scaling of the occupation number depends on whether one has an even or odd number of particles. Since this quantity is a measure of the coherence of our sample we show how the odd-even effect manifests itself in both the momentum distribution of the Bose gas and interference fringe visibility during free temporal evolution.