Cold Bose Atoms Around the Crossing of Quantum Waveguides

Abstract

We show that massive low energy particles traversing a branching zone or a crossing of quantum waveguides may experience a non standard trapping force that cannot be derived from a potential. For interacting cold Bose atoms we report on the formation of a localised Hartree ground state for three prototype waveguide geometries with broken translational symmetry: a cranked L-shaped waveguide L, a T-shaped waveguide T, and the crossing C of two quantum waveguides. The phenomenon is kinetic energy driven and cannot be described within the Thomas-Fermi approximation. Depending on the ratio of joining lateral tube diameters of the respective waveguides C,L,T delocalisation commences when the particle number N approaches a critical value. For the case of a binary mixture of two different Bose atom species A and B we observe non standard trapping of both atom species for subcritical particle numbers. A sudden demixing quantum transition takes place as the total particle number N=N_{A}+N_{B} is increased at fixed mixing ratio N_{A}/N_{B}. Depending on the mass ratio m_{A}/m_{B} the heavier atom species delocalises first for a wide range of interaction parameters. The numerical calculations are based on a splitting scheme involving an analytic approximation to the short time asymptotics of the imaginary time quantum propagator of a single particle obeying to Dirichlet boundary conditions at the walls inside the respective waveguides.