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Many-body quantum ratchet in a Bose-Einstein condensate

Dario Poletti, Giuliano Benenti, Giulio Casati, Baowen Li

cond-mat.otherarXiv:cond-mat/0609535

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a dilute Bose-Einstein condensate confined in a toroidal trap and exposed to a pair of periodically flashed optical lattices. We first prove that in the noninteracting case this system can present a quantum symmetry which forbids the ratchet effect classically expected. We then show how many-body atom-atom interactions, treated within the mean-field approximation, can break this quantum symmetry, thus generating directed transport.

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