Landau–Zener Tunnelling of Two-Component Bose–Einstein Condensates in Optical Lattices

Abstract

We investigate the Landau–Zener tunnelling of two-component Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) in optical lattices. In the neighborhood of the Brillouin zone edge, the system can be reduced to two coupled nonlinear two-level models. From the models, we calculate the change of the tunnelling probability for each component with the linear sweeping rate. It is found that the probability for each component exhibits regular oscillating behavior for the larger sweeping rate, but for smaller rate the oscillation is irregular. Moreover, the asymmetry of the tunnelling between the two components can be induced by the unbalanced initial populations or the inequality of the two self-interactions when the cross-interaction between the components exists. The result can not be found in the single component BECs.