How an interacting many-body system tunnels through a potential barrier to open space.

ABSTRACT: The tunneling process in a many-body system is a phenomenon which lies at the very heart of quantum mechanics. It appears in nature in the form of α-decay, fusion and fission in nuclear physics, and photoassociation and photodissociation in biology and chemistry. A detailed theoretical description of the decay process in these systems is a very cumbersome problem, either because of very complicated or even unknown interparticle interactions or due to a large number of constituent particles. In this work, we theoretically study the phenomenon of quantum many-body tunneling in a transparent and controllable physical system, an ultracold atomic gas. We analyze a full, numerically exact many-body solution of the Schrödinger equation of a one-dimensional system with repulsive interactions tunne

SUBMITTER: Lode AU 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3427127 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature