Layered Chaos in Mean-field and Quantum Many-body Dynamics

Abstract

We investigate the dimension of the phase space attractor of a quantum chaotic many-body ratchet in the mean-field limit. Specifically, we explore a driven Bose-Einstein condensate in three distinct dynamical regimes - Rabi oscillations, chaos, and self-trapping regime, and for each of them we calculate the correlation dimension. For the ground state of the ratchet formed by a system of field-free non-interacting particles, we find four distinct pockets of chaotic dynamics throughout these regimes. We show that a measurement of a local density in each of the dynamical regimes, has an attractor characterized with a higher fractal dimension, $D_{R}=2.59\pm0.01$, $D_{C}=3.93\pm0.04$, and $D_{S}=3.05\pm0.05$, as compared to the global measure of current, $D_{R}=2.07\pm0.02$, $D_{C}=2.96\pm0.05$, and $D_{S}=2.30\pm0.02$. We find that the many-body case converges to mean-field limit with strong sub-unity power laws in particle number $N$, namely $N^α$ with $α_{R}={0.28\pm0.01}$, $α_{C}={0.34\pm0.067}$ and $α_{S}={0.90\pm0.24}$ for each of the dynamical regimes mentioned above. The deviation between local and global measurement of the attractor's dimension corresponds to an increase towards high condensate depletion which remains constant for long time scales in both Rabi and chaotic regimes. The depletion is found to scale polynomially with particle number as $N^β$ with $β_{R}={0.51\pm0.004}$ and $β_{C}={0.18\pm0.004}$ for the two regimes. Thus, we find a strong deviation from the mean-field results, especially in the chaotic regime of the quantum ratchet. The ratchet also reveals quantum revivals in the Rabi and self-trapped regimes but not in the chaotic regime. Based on the obtained results we outline pathways for the identification and characterization of the emergent phenomena in driven many-body systems.