Collective decoherence of cold atoms coupled to a Bose-Einstein condensate

TL;DR

This paper studies the exact dynamics of cold atom impurities interacting with a Bose-Einstein condensate, revealing unique coherence phenomena and the influence of environment correlations on decoherence.

Contribution

It presents an exact analysis of impurity decoherence in a BEC environment, highlighting novel coherence oscillations and the impact of spatial structure and correlations.

Findings

Observation of coherence oscillations in impurity dynamics

Identification of super and sub decoherent states

Persistence of coherence at long times due to spatial structure

Abstract

We examine the time evolution of cold atoms (impurities) interacting with an environment consisting of a degenerate bosonic quantum gas. The impurity atoms differ from the environment atoms, being of a different species. This allows one to superimpose two independent trapping potentials, each being effective only on one atomic kind, while transparent to the other. When the environment is homogeneous and the impurities are confined in a potential consisting of a set of double wells, the system can be described in terms of an effective spin-boson model, where the occupation of the left or right well of each site represents the two (pseudo)-spin states. The irreversible dynamics of such system is here studied exactly, i.e., not in terms of a Markovian master equation. The dynamics of one and two impurities is remarkably different in respect of the standard decoherence of the spin - boson system. In particular we show: i) the appearance of coherence oscillations, i) the presence of super and sub decoherent states which differ from the standard ones of the spin boson model, and iii) the persistence of coherence in the system at long times. We show that this behaviour is due to the fact that the pseudospins have an internal spatial structure. We argue that collective decoherence also prompts information about the correlation length of the environment. In a one dimensional configuration one can change even stronger the qualitative behaviour of the dephasing just by tuning the interaction of the bath.