Longitudinal and transversal resonant tunneling of interacting bosons in a two-dimensional Josephson junction

We unravel the out-of-equilibrium quantum dynamics of a few interacting bosonic clouds in a two-dimensional asymmetric double-well potential at the resonant tunneling scenario. At the single-particle level of resonant tunneling, particles tunnel under the barrier from, typically, the ground-state in the left well to an excited state in the right well, i.e., states of different shapes and properties are coupled when their one-particle energies coincide. In two spatial dimensions, two types of resonant tunneling processes are possible, to which we refer to as longitudinal and transversal resonant tunneling. Longitudinal resonant tunneling implies that the state in the right well is longitudinally-excited with respect to the state in the left well, whereas transversal resonant tunneling implies that the former is transversely-excited with respect to the latter. We show that interaction between bosons makes resonant tunneling phenomena in two spatial dimensions profoundly rich, and analyze these phenomena in terms of the loss of coherence of the junction and development of fragmentation, and coupling between transverse and longitudinal degrees-of-freedom and excitations. To this end, a detailed analysis of the tunneling dynamics is performed by exploring the time evolution of a few physical quantities, namely, the survival probability, occupation numbers of the reduced one-particle density matrix, and the many-particle position, momentum, and angular-momentum variances. To accurately calculate these physical quantities from the time-dependent many-boson wavefunction, we apply a well-established many-body method, the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree for bosons (MCTDHB), which incorporates quantum correlations exhaustively. By comparing the survival probabilities and variances at the mean-field and many-body levels of theory and investigating the development of fragmentation, we identify the detailed mechanisms of many-body longitudinal and transversal resonant tunneling in two dimensional asymmetric double-wells. In particular, we find that the position and momentum variances along the transversal direction are almost negligible at the longitudinal resonant tunneling, whereas they are substantial at the transversal resonant tunneling which is caused by the combination of the density and breathing mode oscillations. We show that the width of the interparticle interaction potential does not affect the qualitative physics of resonant tunneling dynamics, both at the mean-field and many-body levels. In general, we characterize the impact of the transversal and longitudinal degrees-of-freedom in the many-boson tunneling dynamics at the resonant tunneling scenarios.

Effects of time on the evolution of a wave packet in the tunneling dynamics

We investigate the time-dependent electron wave packet in a one-dimensional geometry with the potential bent by a homogeneous external field. Based on the behaviors of the wave packet over time, we observe a crossover time. After this crossover time, the temporal evolution of the wave packet comes into a new regime, where the wave packet evolves in a self-similar structure. To establish the time scale of this crossover quantitatively, we utilize the Loschmidt Echo function, through which the time at which the crossover occurs can be extracted. We also find the time of the maximum ionization velocity can be comparable with the semi-classical tunneling delay time.

Tunneling dynamics in cosmological bounce models

Quasiclassical methods are used to define dynamical tunneling times in models of quantum cosmological bounces. These methods provide relevant new information compared with the traditional treatment of quantum tunneling by means of tunneling probabilities. As shown here, the quantum dynamics in bounce models is not secure from reaching zero scale factor, re-opening the question of how the classical singularity may be avoided. Moreover, in the examples studied here, tunneling times remain small even for large barriers, highlighting the quantum instability of underlying bounce models.