Mesoscopic quantum superposition states of weakly-coupled matter-wave solitons

Abstract

The Josephson junctions (JJs) are at the heart of modern quantum technologies and metrology. In this work we establish quantum features of an atomic soliton Josephson junction (SJJ) device, which consists of two weakly-coupled condensates with negative scattering length. The condensates are trapped in a double-well potential and elongated in one dimension. Starting with classical field theory we map for the first time a two-soliton problem onto the effective two-mode Hamiltonian and perform a second quantization procedure. Compared to the conventional bosonic Josephson junction condensate system, we show that the SJJ-model in quantum domain exhibits unusual features due to its effective nonlinear strength proportional to the square of total particle number, N2. A novel self-tuning effect for the effective tunneling parameter is also demonstrated in the SJJ-model, which depends on the particle number and rapidly vanishes as the JJ population imbalance increases. The formation of entangled Fock state superposition is predicted for the quantum SJJ-model, revealing dominant N00N-state components at the ‘edges’ for n = 0, N particle number. We have shown that the obtained quantum state is more resistant to few particle losses from the condensates if tiny components of entangled Fock states are present in the vicinity of the major N00N-state component. This peculiarity of the quantum SJJ-model establishes an important difference from its semiclassical analogue obtained in the framework of Hartree approach. Our results are confirmed by studying the first and N-order Hillery–Zubairy criteria applied for studying multiparticle entanglement and planar spin squeezing. The Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen quantum steering represents an important prerequisite for the crossover to the mesoscopic superposition Schrödinger-cat and/or N00N-states. The feasibility in observation for these predicted states of the SJJ-model in the experiments is also discussed by taking into account one- and three-body losses for lithium condensates.