Longitudinal and transversal resonant tunneling of interacting bosons in a two-dimensional Josephson junction: Mean-field and many-body dynamics

TL;DR

This paper investigates the complex out-of-equilibrium quantum dynamics of interacting bosons in a 2D double-well potential, revealing how interactions influence longitudinal and transversal resonant tunneling processes and coherence loss.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of resonant tunneling in two dimensions, highlighting the effects of interactions on coherence, fragmentation, and coupling between degrees of freedom.

Findings

Interaction induces rich tunneling phenomena in 2D.

Transversal and longitudinal degrees-of-freedom significantly affect dynamics.

Resonant tunneling leads to coherence loss and fragmentation.

Abstract

We unravel the out-of-equilibrium quantum dynamics of a few interacting bosonic clouds in a two-dimensional asymmetric double-well potential at the resonant tunneling scenario. At the single-particle level of resonant tunneling, particles tunnel under the barrier from, typically, the ground-state in the left well to an excited state in the right well, i.e., states of different shapes and properties are coupled when their one-particle energies coincide. In two spatial dimensions, two types of resonant tunneling processes are possible, to which we refer to as longitudinal and transversal resonant tunneling. Longitudinal resonant tunneling implies that the state in the right well is longitudinally-excited with respect to the state in the left well, whereas transversal resonant tunneling implies that the former is transversely-excited with respect to the latter. We show that interaction between bosons makes resonant tunneling phenomena in two spatial dimensions profoundly rich, and analyze these phenomena in terms of the loss of coherence of the junction and development of fragmentation, and coupling between transverse and longitudinal degrees-of-freedom and excitations. To this end, a detailed analysis of the tunneling dynamics is performed by exploring the time evolution of a few physical quantities, namely, the survival probability, occupation numbers of the reduced one-particle density matrix, and the many-particle position, momentum, and angular-momentum variances. In general, we display the impact of the transversal and longitudinal degrees-of-freedom in the many-boson tunneling dynamics at the resonant tunneling scenarios.