Phase-matching condition for enhanced entanglement of colliding indistinguishable quantum bright solitons in a harmonic trap

Abstract

We investigate finite number effects in collisions between two states of an initially well defined number of identical bosons with attractive contact interactions, oscillating in the presence of harmonic confinement in one dimension. We investigate two $N/2$ atom bound states, which are initially displaced (symmetrically) from the trap center, and then left to freely evolve. For sufficiently attractive interactions, these bound states are like those found through use of the Bethe Ansatz (quantum solitons). However, unlike the free case, the integrability is lost due to confinement, and collisions can cause mixing into different bound state configurations. We study the system numerically for the simplest case of $N=4$, via an exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian within a finite basis, investigating left/right number uncertainty as our primary measure of entanglement. We find that for certain interaction strengths, a phase matching condition leads to resonant transfer to different bound state configurations with highly non-Poissonian relative number statistics.