Tunable tunneling: An application of stationary states of Bose-Einstein condensates in traps of finite depth

The fundamental question of how Bose-Einstein condensates tunnel into a barrier is addressed. The cubic nonlinear Schrödinger equation with a finite square well potential, which models a Bose-Einstein condensate in a trap of finite depth, is solved for the complete set of localized and partially localized stationary states, which the former evolve into when the nonlinearity is increased. An immediate application of these different solution types is tunable tunneling. Magnetically tunable Feshbach resonances can change the scattering length of certain Bose-condensed atoms, such as ⁸⁵Rb, by several orders of magnitude, including the sign, and thereby also change the mean field nonlinearity term of the equation and the tunneling of the wave function. We find both linear-type localized solutions and uniquely nonlinear partially localized solutions where the tails of the wave function become nonzero at infinity when the nonlinearity increases. The tunneling of the wave function into the nonclassical regime (and thus its localization) therefore becomes an external experimentally controllable parameter.