Multidimensional revival dynamics in a bosonic many-body system

Abstract

The collapse and revival of localized states in many-body systems is a quintessential example of a quantum interference phenomenon that cannot be explained purely within mean-field theories. Historically, the majority of previous work on quantum revivals has been in a Schrödinger mechanics context, typically for effectively 1D systems with a focus on the autocorrelation function as the key detection observable. The general revival subject acquires a far greater complexity in the bosonic many-body context that offers a larger variety of observables and intrinsically implies high dimensionality. Here, the focus is on the simplest nontrivial (i.e., not 1D) bosonic many-body system, namely a symmetric two-site Bose-Hubbard model. The non-equilibrium situation of a coherent initial state prepared on one of the two sites of this integrable 2D system in the strongly self-trapping regime is considered. The revival behaviors emerging from the resulting dynamics within expectation values, coherences, and the autocorrelation function are theoretically derived, and the entanglement behavior is illustrated. Several new features, unknown so far in the Schrödinger context and identified here in terms of five ``puzzles'', are encountered and discussed, among them, a synchronized resurgence behavior, differing revivals times depending on the specific observable, and a manifestation of a precession that appears in the underlying mean field dynamics. These new phenomena can be entirely understood through a comprehensive semiclassical theory, building upon the underlying classical (mean-field) phase-space structure. A quantitative comparison of the latter with semiclassical predictions and quantum perturbative calculations yields an overall excellent agreement and confirms that a full semiclassical theory is pivotal for the understanding of these genuinely quantum many-body interference phenomena.