Many-body Landau-Zener dynamics in coupled 1D Bose liquids

TL;DR

This paper explores many-body quantum dynamics by experimentally and theoretically extending the Landau-Zener model to coupled 1D Bose liquids, revealing how correlations and interactions modify the transition behavior.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental and theoretical investigation of a many-body generalization of the Landau-Zener problem in ultracold atom systems.

Findings

Correlations and interactions significantly alter Landau-Zener transition probabilities.

Mean-field and phonon models successfully explain the observed dynamics.

Tuning system parameters controls the many-body Landau-Zener behavior.

Abstract

The Landau-Zener model of a quantum mechanical two-level system driven with a linearly time dependent detuning has served over decades as a textbook paradigm of quantum dynamics. In their seminal work [L. D. Landau, Physik. Z. Sowjet. 2, 46 (1932); C. Zener, Proc. Royal Soc. London 137, 696 (1932)], Landau and Zener derived a non-perturbative prediction for the transition probability between two states, which often serves as a reference point for the analysis of more complex systems. A particularly intriguing question is whether that framework can be extended to describe many-body quantum dynamics. Here we report an experimental and theoretical study of a system of ultracold atoms, offering a direct many-body generalization of the Landau-Zener problem. In a system of pairwise tunnel-coupled 1D Bose liquids we show how tuning the correlations of the 1D gases, the tunnel coupling between the tubes and the inter-tube interactions strongly modify the original Landau-Zener picture. The results are explained using a mean-field description of the inter-tube condensate wave-function, coupled to the low-energy phonons of the 1D Bose liquid.