Many body effects in one-dimensional attractive Bose gases

Abstract

In this thesis we investigate the properties of ultra-cold quantum gases in reduced dimension and the effects of harmonic confinement on soliton-like properties. We study regimes of agreement between mean-field and many-body theories the generation of entanglement between initially independent finite sized atomic systems.

Classical solitons are non-dispersing waves which occur in integrable systems, such as atomic Bose-Einstein condensates in one dimension. Bright and dark solitons are possible, which exist as peaks or dips in density. Quantum solitons are the bound-state solutions to a system satisfying quantum integrability, given via the Bethe Ansatz. Such integrability is broken by the introduction of harmonic confinement. We investigate the equivalence of the classical field and many-body solutions in the limit of large numbers of atoms and derive numerical and variational approaches to examine the ground state energy in harmonic confinement and the fidelity between a Hartree-product solution and a quantum soliton solution.

Soliton collisions produce no entanglement between either state and result only in an asymptotic position and phase shift, however external potentials break integrability and thus give the possibility of entangling solitons. We investigate the dynamical entanglement generation between two atomic dimers in harmonic confinement via exact diagonalisation in a basis of Harmonic oscillator functions, making use of the separability of the centre-of-mass component of the Hamiltonian. We show repulsive states show complex dynamics, but with an overall tendency towards states of larger invariant correlation entropy, whereas attractive states resist entanglement unless a phase matching condition is satisfied. This phase matching condition could in theory be used to generate states with highly non-Poissonian number superpositions in atomic systems with controlled number.