We study the dynamics of strongly correlated one-dimensional Bose gases in a combined harmonic and optical lattice potential subjected to sudden displacement of the confining potential. Using the time-evolving block decimation method, we perform a first-principles quantum many-body simulation of the experiment of Fertig et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 120403 (2005)] across different values of the lattice depth ranging from the superfluid to the Mott insulator regimes. We find good quantitative agreement with this experiment: the damping of the dipole oscillations is significant even for shallow lattices, and the motion becomes overdamped with increasing lattice depth as observed. We show that the transition to overdamping is attributed to the decay of superfluid flow accelerated by quantum fluctuations, which occurs well before the emergence of Mott insulator domains.
We study the dynamics of strongly correlated one-dimensional Bose gases in a combined harmonic and optical lattice potential subjected to sudden displacement of the confining potential. Using the time-evolving block decimation method, we perform a first-principles quantum many-body simulation of the experiment of Fertig et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 120403 (2005)] across different values of the lattice depth ranging from the superfluid to the Mott insulator regimes. We find good quantitative agreement with this experiment: the damping of the dipole oscillations is significant even for shallow lattices, and the motion becomes overdamped with increasing lattice depth as observed. We show that the transition to overdamping is attributed to the decay of superfluid flow accelerated by quantum fluctuations, which occurs well before the emergence of Mott insulator domains.
We present a theoretical treatment of the surprisingly large damping observed recently in one-dimensional Bose-Einstein atomic condensates in optical lattices. We show that time-dependent Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) calculations can describe qualitatively the main features of the damping observed over a range of lattice depths. We also derive a formula of the fluctuation-dissipation type for the damping, based on a picture in which the coherent motion of the condensate atoms is disrupted as they try to flow through the random local potential created by the irregular motion of noncondensate atoms. When parameters for the characteristic strength and correlation times of the fluctuations, obtained from the HFB calculations, are substituted in the damping formula, we find very good agreement with the experimentally observed damping, as long as the lattice is shallow enough for the fraction of atoms in the Mott insulator phase to be negligible. We also include, for completeness, the results of other calculations based on the Gutzwiller ansatz, which appear to work better for the deeper lattices.
We present a theoretical treatment of the surprisingly large damping observed recently in one-dimensional Bose-Einstein atomic condensates in optical lattices. We show that time-dependent Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) calculations can describe qualitatively the main features of the damping observed over a range of lattice depths. We also derive a formula of the fluctuation-dissipation type for the damping, based on a picture in which the coherent motion of the condensate atoms is disrupted as they try to flow through the random local potential created by the irregular motion of noncondensate atoms. We expect this irregular motion to result from the well-known dynamical instability exhibited by the mean-field theory for these systems. When parameters for the characteristic strength and correlation times of the fluctuations, obtained from the HFB calculations, are substituted in the damping formula, we find very good agreement with the experimentally-observed damping, as long as the lattice is shallow enough for the fraction of atoms in the Mott insulator phase to be negligible. We also include, for completeness, the results of other calculations based on the Gutzwiller ansatz, which appear to work better for the deeper lattices.
We report the observation of strongly damped dipole oscillations of a quantum degenerate 1D atomic Bose gas in a combined harmonic and optical lattice potential. Damping is significant for very shallow axial lattices (0.25 photon recoil energies), and increases dramatically with increasing lattice depth, such that the gas becomes nearly immobile for times an order of magnitude longer than the single-particle tunneling time. Surprisingly, we see no broadening of the atomic quasimomentum distribution after damped motion. Recent theoretical work suggests that quantum fluctuations can strongly damp dipole oscillations of a 1D atomic Bose gas, providing a possible explanation for our observations.
We study the dynamics of a nonintegrable system comprising interacting cold bosons trapped in an optical lattice in one dimension by means of exact time-dependent numerical density-matrix renormalization group techniques. Particles are confined by a parabolic potential, and dipole oscillations are induced by displacing the trap center of a few lattice sites. Depending on the system parameters this motion can vary from undamped to overdamped. We study the dipole oscillations as a function of the lattice displacement, the particle density, and the strength of interparticle interactions. These results explain the recent experiment [C. D. Fertig et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 120403 (2005)].
Ultracold Bose gases in one-dimensional optical lattices constitute an important benchmark problem in the study of strongly interacting many-body quantum phases. Here we present a combined experimental and theoretical study of their phase-coherence properties over a wide range of lattice depths. Experimentally, we extract the single-particle correlation function directly from the measured momentum distribution. Theoretically, we perform tensor-network simulations of the Bose-Hubbard model that incorporate all relevant experimental parameters. For deep lattices well within the Mott insulator regime, the experimental results are in good agreement with the expected zero-temperature behavior, with only small temperature-dependent corrections. As the lattice depth is reduced, finite-temperature effects become increasingly important. We find that the experimental data are quantitatively described by an effective temperature extracted from the tensor-network simulations, and that this effective temperature decreases markedly with increasing lattice depth. Rather than indicating actual cooling, we interpret this behavior as evidence of inhibition of thermalization caused by the formation of Mott domains that suppress heat transport. Counterintuitively, the inhibition of thermalization favors the preparation of an effectively low-entropy quantum gas in the trap center for large lattice depths.
Ultracold bosonic gases in optical lattices are strongly correlated quantum systems similar to solids. The strong correlation between the electrons in a solid on the one hand, and the bosonic atoms in optical lattice on the other, exhibit various quantum phenomena like insulation, conductivity, localization of electrons and atoms, respectively. Controlled by the intensity of the lattice laser, the ultracold bosonic gas can be transferred from a regime with superfluid character for shallow lattices into a regime of strong correlations, the Mott insulator. As an additional external parameter besides the lattice depth, one can generate spatial inhomogeneities by superimposing an additional standing wave (so-called two-color superlattices), which gives rise to localization effects or the formation of a Bose-glass phase. In the present work, numerical simulations are employed in order to investigate characteristic signatures of the quantum phases in the low-energy excitation spectrum of one-dimensional systems. We simulate temporal small amplitude modulations of the optical lattice in analogy to experiments, and evaluate the response of the system from the time-evolved initial state. The lattice systems are described in the framework of the Bose-Hubbard model. For the evaluation of the time-evolved state, we employ several numerical methods. We analyze systems of small size (6 particles on 6 sites) using an exact time-evolution by integration of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. The formulation of an importance truncation scheme enables us to retain only the relevant components of the model space in the strongly correlated regime and, thus, allows for the investigation of systems with 10 particles on 10 sites using exact time-evolution. Based on this method, we present results of the Mott-insulating regime as well as for the Bose-glass phase. Furthermore, we employ particle-hole methods, which allow for the treatment of systems with experimental lattice sizes and particle numbers. Starting from the equation of motion method we adapt the Tamm-Dancoff approximation as well as the random-phase approximation for the occupation number representation of the Bose-Hubbard model. We present results of simulations of up to 50 particles on 50 sites and discuss the impact of the lattice depth on the low-energy excitations (U-resonance). Moreover, the impact of a two-color superlattice and the variation of its amplitude is investigated.