Collective decoherence of cold atoms coupled to a Bose-Einstein condensate

We examine the time evolution of cold atoms (impurities) interacting with an environment consisting of a degenerate bosonic quantum gas. The impurity atoms differ from the environment atoms, being of a different species. This allows one to superimpose two independent trapping potentials, each being effective only on one atomic kind, while transparent to the other. When the environment is homogeneous and the impurities are confined in a potential consisting of a set of double wells, the system can be described in terms of an effective spin-boson model, where the occupation of the left or right well of each site represents the two (pseudo)-spin states. The irreversible dynamics of such system is here studied exactly, i.e., not in terms of a Markovian master equation. The dynamics of one and two impurities is remarkably different in respect of the standard decoherence of the spin - boson system. In particular we show: i) the appearance of coherence oscillations, i) the presence of super and sub decoherent states which differ from the standard ones of the spin boson model, and iii) the persistence of coherence in the system at long times. We show that this behaviour is due to the fact that the pseudospins have an internal spatial structure. We argue that collective decoherence also prompts information about the correlation length of the environment. In a one dimensional configuration one can change even stronger the qualitative behaviour of the dephasing just by tuning the interaction of the bath.

💡 Research Summary

The paper investigates the exact non‑Markovian dynamics of impurity atoms immersed in a homogeneous Bose‑Einstein condensate (BEC). The impurities belong to a different atomic species, allowing independent trapping potentials: a double‑well lattice confines each impurity, while the BEC experiences a separate, species‑specific trap. In this configuration the occupation of the left or right well of a given site defines a two‑level (pseudo‑spin) system. By linearising the impurity‑BEC interaction via a Bogoliubov transformation, the authors map the whole setup onto an effective spin‑boson model in which the coupling constants acquire a spatial phase factor e^{ik·d} that depends on the inter‑well distance d.

Because the pseudo‑spins possess an internal spatial structure, the usual point‑like spin‑boson assumptions no longer hold. The authors solve the full Hamiltonian exactly, obtaining the reduced density matrix of the spins as ρ_{LR}(t)=ρ_{LR}(0) exp