Impurity in a bosonic Josephson junction: swallowtail loops, chaos, self-trapping and the poor man's Dicke model

Abstract

We study a model describing \(N\) identical bosonic atoms trapped in a double-well potential together with a single impurity atom, comparing and contrasting it throughout with the Dicke model. As the boson-impurity coupling strength is varied, there is a symmetry-breaking pitchfork bifurcation which is analogous to the quantum phase transition occurring in the Dicke model. Through stability analysis around the bifurcation point, we show that the critical value of the coupling strength has the same dependence on the parameters as the critical coupling value in the Dicke model. We also show that, like the Dicke model, the mean-field dynamics go from being regular to chaotic above the bifurcation and macroscopic excitations of the bosons are observed. Overall, the boson-impurity system behaves like a poor man's version of the Dicke model.