Enhancing sensitivity to rotations with quantum solitonic currents

Abstract

We study a gas of attracting bosons confined in a ring shape potential pierced by an artificial magnetic field. Because of attractive interactions, quantum analogs of bright solitons are formed. As a genuine quantum-many-body feature, we demonstrate that angular momentum fractionalization occurs and that such an effect manifests on time of flight measurements. As a consequence, the matter-wave current in our system can react to very small changes of rotation or other artificial gauge fields. We worked out a protocol to entangle such quantum solitonic currents, allowing us to operate rotation sensors and gyroscopes to Heisenberg-limited sensitivity. Therefore, we demonstrate that the specific coherence and entanglement properties of the system can induce an enhancement of sensitivity to an external rotation.