Eur. Phys. J. B (2014) 87: 157
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2014-50066-8

Regular Article

Effect of one-, two-, and three-body atom loss processes on superpositions of phase states in Bose-Josephson junctions

¹ Univ. Grenoble Alpes and CNRS, Institut Fourier, 38000 Grenoble, France
² Univ. Grenoble Alpes, LPMMC, 38000 Grenoble, France
³ CNRS, LPMMC, 38000 Grenoble, France
⁴ Center for Theoretical Physics PAN, 02-668 Warsaw, Poland
⁵ Physikalisches Institut, Universität Stuttgart, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany
⁶ Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 75231 Paris, France
⁷ Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, 75000 Paris, France

^a e-mail: spehner@ujf-grenoble.fr

Received: 28 January 2014
Received in final form: 29 May 2014
Published online: 16 July 2014

Abstract

In a two-mode Bose-Josephson junction formed by a binary mixture of ultracold atoms, macroscopic superpositions of phase states are produced during the time evolution after a sudden quench to zero of the coupling amplitude. Using quantum trajectories and an exact diagonalization of the master equation, we study the effect of one-, two-, and three-body atom losses on the superpositions by analyzing separately the amount of quantum correlations in each subspace with fixed atom number. The quantum correlations useful for atom interferometry are estimated using the quantum Fisher information. We identify the choice of parameters leading to the largest Fisher information, thereby showing that, for all kinds of loss processes, quantum correlations can be partially protected from decoherence when the losses are strongly asymmetric in the two modes.