%0 Journal Article
%T Pair tunneling of two atoms out of a trap
%A Massimo Rontani
%J Physics
%D 2013
%I arXiv
%R 10.1103/PhysRevA.88.043633
%X A simple theory for the tunneling of two cold atoms out of a trap in the presence of an attractive contact force is developed. Two competing decay channels, respectively for single-atom and bound-pair tunneling, contribute independently to the decay law of the mean atom number in the trap. The single-atom tunneling rate is obtained through the quasiparticle wave function formalism. For pair tunneling an effective equation for the center-of-mass motion is derived, so the calculation of the corresponding tunneling rate is again reduced to a simpler one-body problem. The predicted dependence of tunneling rates on the interaction strength qualitatively agrees with a recent measurement of the two-atom decay time [G. Zuern, A. N. Wenz, S. Murmann, T. Lompe, and S. Jochim, arXiv:1307.5153].
%U http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.2174v2