Tunneling decay of two interacting bosons in an asymmetric double-well potential: A spectral approach

We study the full-fledged microscopic dynamics of two interacting, ultracold bosons in a one-dimensional double-well potential, through the numerically exact diagonalization of the many-body Hamiltonian. With the particles initially prepared in the left well, we increase the width of the right well in subsequent trap realizations and witness how the tunneling oscillations evolve into particle loss. In this closed system, we analyze the spectral signatures of single-and two-particle tunneling for the entire range of repulsive interactions. We conclude that for comparable widths of the two wells, pairwise tunneling of the bosons may be realized for specific system parameters. In contrast, the decay process (corresponding to a broad right well) is dominated by uncorrelated single-particle decay. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.87.043626