Macroscopic self trapping in the dynamical tunneling of a Bose-Einstein condensate

Sebastian Wüster

Max Planck Institute Dresden, Germany

Dynamical tunneling is analogous to the more familiar tunneling of regular single particles between two wells, but takes place between two period-one islands in a semi-chaotic classical phase space. We study the dynamical tunneling of a BEC in a modulated anharmonic potential. We find macroscopic nonlinear self-trapping above a critical interaction strength, and derive a dynamical two mode model to explain our results.