Macroscopic quantum coherence in spinor condensates confined in an anisotropic potential

We investigate the macroscopic quantum spin coherence of a spinor condensate confined in an anisotropic potential. Under the single-mode approximation, we show that a spin-1 Rb condensate can be modeled as a biaxial quantum magnet. A direct consequence of the biaxial anisotropy is that the tunneling splitting oscillates as a function of the external magnetic field applied along the hard axis. We also propose an experimental scheme to detect the oscillatory behavior of the tunneling splitting by employing the Landau-Zener tunneling.