NOON state of Bose atoms in the double-well potential via an excited-state quantum phase transition

Abstract

We suggest a simple scheme for creating a NOON state of repulsively interacting Bose atoms in the double-well potential. The protocol consists of two steps. First, by setting atom-atom interactions to zero, the system is driven to the upper excited state. Second, the interactions are slowly increased and, simultaneously, the interwell tunneling is decreased to zero. We analyze fidelity of the final state to the NOON state depending on the number of atoms, ramp rate, and fluctuations of the system parameters. It is shown that for a given fidelity the ramp rate scales algebraically with the number of atoms.