Many-body quantum boomerang effect

Abstract

We study numerically the impact of many-body interactions on the quantum boomerang effect. We consider various cases: weakly interacting bosons, the Tonks-Girardeau gas, and strongly interacting bosons (which may be mapped onto weakly interacting fermions). Numerical simulations are performed using the time-evolving block decimation algorithm, a quasiexact method based on matrix product states. In the case of weakly interacting bosons, we find a partial destruction of the quantum boomerang effect, in agreement with the earlier mean-field study [J. Janarek et al., Phys. Rev. A 102, 013303 (2020)]. For the Tonks-Girardeau gas, we show the presence of the full quantum boomerang effect. For strongly interacting bosons, we observe a partial boomerang effect. We show that the destruction of the quantum boomerang effect is universal and does not depend on the details of the interaction between particles.