Macroscopic quantum many-body tunneling of attractive Bose-Einstein condensate in anharmonic trap

TL;DR

This study investigates the stability and macroscopic quantum tunneling of attractive Bose-Einstein condensates in anharmonic traps, revealing new stability behaviors and tunneling dynamics differing from mean-field predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a correlated two-body basis approach to analyze BEC stability and tunneling in anharmonic traps, highlighting differences from mean-field and previous studies.

Findings

Attractive BEC gains stability with more particles in anharmonic traps.

Near collapse, MQT dominates decay over two- and three-body losses.

Power law behavior in MQT observed in harmonic traps but not in anharmonic traps.

Abstract

We study the stability of attractive atomic Bose-Einstein condensate and the macroscopic quantum many-body tunneling (MQT) in the anharmonic trap. We utilize correlated two-body basis function which keeps all possible two-body correlations. The anharmonic parameter ($\lambda$) is slowly tuned from harmonic to anharmonic. For each choice of $\lambda$ the many-body equation is solved adiabatically. The use of the van der Waals interaction gives realistic picture which substantially differs from the mean-field results. For weak anharmonicity, we observe that the attractive condensate gains stability with larger number of bosons compared to that in the pure harmonic trap. The transition from resonances to bound states with weak anharmonicity also differs significantly from the earlier study of Moiseyev {\it et.al.}[J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. {\bf{37}}, L193 (2004)]. We also study the tunneling of the metastable condensate very close to the critical number $N_{cr}$ of collapse and observe that near collapse the MQT is the dominant decay mechanism compared to the two-body and three-body loss rate. We also observe the power law behavior in MQT near the critical point. The results for pure harmonic trap are in agreement with mean-field results. However we fail to retrieve the power law behavior in anharmonic trap although MQT is still the dominant decay mechanism.