Enhancing sensitivity to rotations with quantum solitonic currents

Quantum mechanics is characterized by quantum coherence and entanglement. After having discovered how these fundamental concepts govern physical reality, scientists have been devoting intense efforts to harness them to shape future science and technology. This is a highly nontrivial task because most often quantum coherence and entanglement are difficult to access. Here, we demonstrate the enhancement of the sensitivity of a quantum many-body system with specific coherence and entanglement properties. Our physical system is made of strongly correlated attracting neutral bosons flowing in a ring-shaped potential of mesoscopic size. 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. As a consequence, the matter-wave current in our system can react to very small changes of rotation or other artificial gauge fields. We work out a protocol to entangle such quantum solitonic currents, allowing them to operate rotation sensors and gyroscopes to Heisenberg-limited sensitivity.
Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures