Single-atom box : Bosonic staircase and effects of parity

We have developed a theory of a Josephson junction formed by two tunnel-coupled Bose-Einstein condensates in a double-well potential in the regime of strong atom-atom interaction for an arbitrary total number N of bosons in the condensates. The tunnel resonances in the junction are shown to be periodically spaced by the interaction energy, forming a single-atom staircase sensitive to the parity of N even for large N. One of the manifestations of the staircase structure is the periodic modulation with the bias energy of the visibility of the interference pattern in lattices of junctions.