Coherence and entanglement in the ground state of a bosonic Josephson junction: From macroscopic Schrödinger cat states to separable Fock states

Abstract

We consider a bosonic Josephson junction made of $N$ ultracold and dilute atoms confined by a quasi one-dimensional double-well potential within the two-site Bose-Hubbard model framework. The behaviour of the system is investigated at zero temperature by varying the inter-atomic interaction from the strongly attractive regime to the repulsive one. We show that the ground-state exhibits a crossover from a macroscopic Schr\"odinger-cat state to a separable Fock state through an atomic coherent regime. By diagonalizing the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian we characterize the emergence of the mascroscopic cat states by calculating the Fisher information $F$, the coherence by means of the visibility $\alpha$ of the interference fringes in the momentum distribution, and the quantum correlations by using the entanglement entropy $S$. Both Fisher information and visibility are shown to be related to the ground state energy by employing the Hellmann-Feynman theorem. This result, together with a perturbative calculation of the ground-state energy, makes possible to obtain simple analytical formulas for $F$ and $\alpha$ over a range of interactions, in excellent agreement with the exact diagonalization of the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian. In the attractive regime the entanglement entropy attains values very close to its upper limit for a specific interaction strength lying in the region where coherence is lost and self trapping sets in.