Eur. Phys. J. D (2015) 69: 181
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2015-50814-4

Regular Article

Quantum tunneling and entanglement of dipolar spin-1 bosons in double well potentials

¹ School of Science, Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 310023, P.R. China
² Department of Physics and Center of Theoretical and Computational Physics, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, P.R. China
³ Department of Physics, Changchun University of Science and Technology, Changchun 130022, P.R. China
⁴ Department of Physics, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou 310036, P.R. China
⁵ Zhejiang Institute of Modern Physics, Department of Physics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, P.R. China

^a e-mail: hyx1226@126.com

Received: 12 November 2014
Received in final form: 29 May 2015
Published online: 23 July 2015

Abstract

We study spinor Bose-Einstein condensates with dipolar interaction in double well potentials. We consider the two-site Bose Hubbard model and find single atom tunneling occurs for the small tunneling strength. We also investigate the entanglement between the two wells and show that the entanglement is due to both number and spin degrees of freedom. The number entanglement is insensitive to the dipolar interaction, while the spin entanglement is suppressed by dipolar interaction. In addition, we show that the single atom tunneling behavior can be manipulated by adiabatically varying the energy offset between the two wells.