Mainz 2026 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 62: Ultra-cold Atoms, Ions and BEC IV (joint session A/Q)
Q 62.8: Vortrag
Donnerstag, 5. März 2026, 16:15–16:30, N 1
Analytical approach to collisional decoherence in a BEC double-well accelerometer — •Kateryna Korshynska1,2 and Sebastian Ulbricht1,2 — 1PTB Braunschweig — 2TU Braunschweig
Modern quantum sensors provide a way to measure accelerations and gravitational fields to tremendous precision, surpassing their classical counterparts. One way to build such a quantum sensor is to exploit the process of quantum tunneling of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), trapped in a double-well potential. This tunneling emerges as the collective oscillations of particles between the wells, which are usually referred to as Josephson oscillations. They rely on the coherence between the quantum states of each well, which can decrease due to collisional decoherence. For the weakly-interacting gas, we analytically describe this decoherence process with the density matrix approach and show how the Josephson oscillations decay with time. Further, we consider the BEC subject to external acceleration and find that the interplay between the acceleration and collisions leads to an additional shift of the oscillation frequency. Moreover, we study how this effect can be used as the basis of a BEC double-well accelerometer and estimate its expected sensitivity.
Keywords: Bose-Einstein condensate; Josephson oscillations; accelerometer; collisional decoherence; density matrix