Coherent control of self-trapping of cold bosonic atoms

Abstract

We study the behavior of ultracold bosonic atoms held in an optical lattice. We first show how a self-trapping transition can be induced in the system either by increasing the number of atoms occupying a lattice site or by raising the interaction strength above a critical value. We then investigate how applying a periodic driving potential to the self-trapped state can be used to coherently control the emission of a precise number of correlated bosons from the trapping site. This allows the preparation and transport of entangled bosonic states, which are of great relevance to novel technologies such as quantum-information processing.