Mechanism of Tunneling in Interacting Open Ultracold Few-Boson Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores the tunneling dynamics of ultracold few-boson systems, revealing how interactions influence decay processes, fragmentation, and stability through numerical and analytical methods.

Contribution

It provides a detailed numerical and analytical investigation of tunneling mechanisms in interacting ultracold bosons, highlighting the role of interactions and fragmentation.

Findings

Decay dynamics involve fragmentation.

Tunneling state shows a stable pattern explained analytically.

Decay is not a coherent process and varies with interactions.

Abstract

We investigate the mechanism in the tunneling dynamics of open ultracold few-boson systems by numerically solving the time-dependent few-boson Schr\"{o}dinger equation exactly. By starting from a weakly repulsive, initially coherent two-boson system we demonstrate that the decay dynamics incorporate fragmentation. The wavefunction of the tunneling state exhibits a pronounced dynamically-stable pattern which we explain by an analytical model. By studying more bosons and stronger interactions we arrive to the conclusion that the decay by tunneling is not a coherent process and exhibits a wealth of phenomena depending on the interaction between the particles.