Many-body tunnelling in a symmetric double-well potential

M. Zendra,1,2 S. Gurvitz,3 G. L. Celardo,4 F. Borgonovi1,2

1Department of Mathematics and Physics and Interdisciplinary Laboratories for Advanced

Materials Physics, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Brescia, Italy

2National Institute for Nuclear Physics, Sezione di Milano, Milano, Italy

3Department of Particle Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

4Physics and Astronomy department, Università degli studi di Firenze, Firenze, Italy

Tunnelling is one of the most fascinating phenomena in quantum physics, whose implications on the dynamics of many-body systems are still unclear. Recently, it has been argued that the presence of inter-particle interactions may lead to cooperative effects, such as the modification of the single-particle tunnelling between wells or the simultaneous tunnelling of a few particles as a single object through a potential barrier. Under certain conditions, these non-standard Hubbard terms are considerably more important than previously assumed, due to correct account of the Wannier functions, which tails were disregarded in many estimations. In this talk, we will examine some preliminary results about possible cooperative effects shown by two particles in a double-well potential, under the effect of different types of interaction. Our results show that, under certain conditions, the non-standard density-induced tunnelling amplitude may suppress the single-particle tunnelling even for repulsive two-particle interactions. This would correspond to a bound state localized in one well, which cannot decay but only propagate between the wells due to the non-standard pair-tunnelling mechanism.

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