Impact of Many-Body Correlations on the Dynamics of an Ion-Controlled Bosonic Josephson Junction

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed many-body analysis of an ion-controlled bosonic Josephson junction, highlighting the role of quantum correlations in entanglement generation and system dynamics, using advanced computational methods.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive ab-initio many-body approach to study ion-boson systems, emphasizing the significance of correlations in entanglement and dynamics.

Findings

Quantum correlations are crucial for entanglement between ion and condensate.

Correlations significantly influence the out-of-equilibrium dynamics.

Entanglement between ion and bosons is experimentally verifiable.

Abstract

We investigate an atomic ensemble of interacting bosons trapped in a symmetric double well potential in contact with a single tightly trapped ion which has been recently proposed [R. Gerritsma et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 080402 (2012)] as a source of entanglement between a Bose-Einstein condensate and an ion. Compared to the previous study, the present work aims at performing a detailed and accurate many-body analysis of such combined atomic quantum system by means of the ab-initio multi-configuration time-dependent Hartree method for bosons, which allows to take into account all correlations in the system. The analysis elucidates the importance of quantum correlations in the bosonic ensemble and reveals that entanglement generation between an ion and a condensate is indeed possible, as previously predicted. Moreover, we provide an intuitive picture of the impact of the correlations on the out-of-equilibrium dynamics by employing a natural orbital analysis which we show to be indeed experimentally verifiable.