Quantum properties of a binary bosonic mixture in a double well

Abstract

This work contains a detailed analysis of the properties of the ground state of a two-component two-site Bose-Hubbard model, which captures the physics of a binary mixture of Bose-Einstein condensates trapped in a double-well potential. The atom-atom interactions within each species and among the two species are taken as variable parameters, while the hopping terms are kept fixed. To characterize the ground state, we use observables such as the imbalance of population and its quantum uncertainty. The quantum many-body correlations present in the system are further quantified by studying the degree of condensation of each species, the entanglement between the two sites, and the entanglement between the two species. The latter is measured by means of the Schmidt gap, the von Neumann entropy, or the purity obtained after tracing out a part of the system. A number of relevant states are identified, e.g., Schrödinger catlike many-body states, in which the outcome of the population imbalance of both components is completely correlated, and other states with even larger von Neumann entropy which have a large spread in Fock space.