Chaos assisted many-body tunnelling

Abstract

We study the interplay of chaos and tunnelling between two weakly-coupled Bose-Josephson junctions. The classical phase space of the composite system has a mixed structure including quasi-integrable self-trapping islands for particles and excitations, separated by a chaotic sea. We show that the many-body dynamical tunnelling gap between macroscopic Schr\"odinger cat states supported by these islands is chaos-enhanced. The many-body tunnelling rate fluctuates over several orders of magnitude with small variations of the system parameters or the particle number.