Massive-vortex realization of a Bosonic Josephson Junction

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that two rotating quantum vortices in a Bose-Einstein condensate can exhibit Josephson oscillations and nonlinear phenomena similar to a Bosonic Josephson Junction, with an analytical model matching numerical simulations.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical model for inter-vortex tunneling in a two-component BEC, linking vortex dynamics to Josephson effects and including many-body interactions.

Findings

Stable Josephson oscillations observed between vortices

Analytical model accurately predicts vortex dynamics at small particle numbers

Effective self-interaction parameter improves model's agreement with numerical results

Abstract

We study the mass exchange between two rotating, quantum massive vortices in a two-component Bose-Einstein condensate. The vortices, in the majority component, exhibit a filled core, where the in-filling minority component undergoes a quantum tunneling effect. Remarkably, we observe that the two-vortex system features stable Josephson oscillations, as well as all the nonlinear phenomena, including the macroscopic quantum self-trapping, that characterize a Bosonic Josephson Junction (BJJ). We propose an analytical model for describing the inter-vortex tunneling, obtained by implementing the a coherent-state representation of the two-mode Bose-Hubbard model. This allows us to give the explicit expression of the model's parameters in terms of the physical macroscopic parameters of the two-vortex system. The comparison of the dynamical scenario predicted by the model with that emerging from the Gross-Pitaevskii equations is very good for sufficiently small particle numbers, while at larger particle numbers it grows less precise, presumably due to the partial exclusion of the many-body interactions from our model. The definition of an effective self-interaction parameter allows us to include the many-body effects, thus restoring a quite good agreement with the numerical results. Interestingly, the recognition of the bosonic Josephson dynamics paves the way to the investigation of new dynamical behaviors in multi-vortex configurations.