Dynamics and decoherence of two cold bosons in a one-dimensional harmonic trap

We study dynamics of two interacting ultracold Bose atoms in a harmonic oscillator potential in one spatial dimension. Making use of the exact solution of the eigenvalue problem of a particle in the delta-like potential, we study the time evolution of an initially separable state of two particles. The corresponding time-dependent single-particle density matrix is obtained and diagonalized, and single-particle orbitals are found. This allows us to study decoherence as well as creation of entanglement during the dynamics. The evolution of the orbital corresponding to the largest eigenvalue is then compared to the evolution according to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We show that if initially the center of mass and relative degrees of freedom are entangled, then the Gross-Pitaevskii equation fails to reproduce the exact dynamics and entanglement is produced dynamically. We stress that predictions of our study can be verified experimentally in an optical lattice in the low-tunneling limit.