  The Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian capturing the essential physics of the arrays of
interacting Bose-Einstein condensates is addressed, focusing on arrays
consisting of two (dimer) and three (trimer) sites. In the former case, some
results concerning the persistence of mean-field features in the energy
spectrum of the symmetric dimer are extended to the asymmetric version of the
system, where the two sites are characterized by different on-site energies.
Based on a previous systematic study of the mean-field limit of the trimer,
where the dynamics is exhaustively described in terms of its fixed points for
every choice of the significant parameters, an interesting mapping between the
dimer and the trimer is emphasized and used as a guide in investigating the
persistence of mean-field features in the rather complex energy spectrum of the
trimer. These results form the basis for the systematic investigation of the
purely quantum trimer extending and completing the existing mean-field
analysis. In this respect we recall that, similar to larger arrays, the trimer
is characterized by a non-integrable mean-field dynamics featuring chaotic
trajectories. Hence, the correspondence between mean-field fixed points and
quantum energy levels emphasized in the present work may provide a key to
investigate the quantum counterpart of classical instability.
