A force applied to a spin-flipped particle in a one-dimensional spinor gas may lead to Bloch oscillations of the particle's position and velocity. The existence of Bloch oscillations crucially depends on the viscous friction force exerted by the rest of the gas on the spin excitation. We evaluate the friction in terms of the quantum fluid parameters. In particular, we show that the friction is absent for integrable cases, such as an SU(2) symmetric gas of bosons or fermions. For small deviations from the exact integrability the friction is very weak, opening the possibility to observe Bloch oscillations.
A force applied to a spin-flipped particle in a one-dimensional spinor gas may lead to Bloch oscillations of the particle's position and velocity. The existence of Bloch oscillations crucially depends on the viscous friction force exerted by the rest of the gas on the spin excitation. We evaluate the friction in terms of the quantum fluid parameters. In particular, we show that the friction is absent for integrable cases, such as an SU(2) symmetric gas of bosons or fermions. For small deviations from the exact integrability the friction is very weak, opening the possibility to observe Bloch oscillations.
We study the motion of an impurity under the action of a constant force through a one-dimensional system of weakly-interacting bosons. The interplay of the impurity-boson interaction, the boson-boson interaction, and the driving force gives rise to a rich dynamics. We focus on the influence of a finite external force. Under these far-from-equilibrium conditions, we show that in a wide range of forces, one part of the momentum transferred to the system is periodically channeled into the Bose gas through the emission of dispersive density shock waves, solitons, density waves and the creation of additional phase gradients. As a result, the impurity velocity does not increase indefinitely, but periodically oscillates in time around the drift velocity. We uncover and characterize different dynamical regimes in a wide range of the impurity-boson coupling, the impurity mass and the external force. At a sufficiently large force, the Bloch oscillations cease and the impurity exhibits an unlimited acceleration.
Bloch oscillations of quantum particles manifest themselves as periodic spreading and relocalization of the associated wave functions when traversing lattice potentials subject to external gradient forces. Albeit this phenomenon is deeply rooted into the very foundations of quantum mechanics, all experimental observations so far have only contemplated dynamics of one and two particles initially prepared in separable local states. Evidently, a more general description of genuinely quantum Bloch oscillations will be achieved on excitation of a Bloch oscillator by nonlocal states. Here we report the observation of Bloch oscillations of two-particle N00N states, and discuss the nonlocality on the ground of Bell-like inequalities. The time evolution of two-photon N00N states in Bloch oscillators, whether symmetric, antisymmetric or partially symmetric, reveals transitions from particle antibunching to bunching. Consequently, the initial states can be tailored to produce spatial correlations akin to those of bosons, fermions and anyons, presenting potential applications in photonic quantum simulation.
We study the viscous properties of a system of weakly interacting spin-1/2 fermions in one dimension. Accounting for the effect of interactions on the quasiparticle energy spectrum, we obtain the bulk viscosity of this system at low temperatures. Our result is valid for frequencies that are small compared with the rate of fermion backscattering. For frequencies larger than this exponentially small rate, the excitations of the system become decoupled from the center of mass motion, and the fluid is described by two-fluid hydrodynamics. We calculate the three transport coefficients required to describe viscous dissipation in this regime.
We explore the quantum dynamics of a bright matter-wave soliton in a quasi-one-dimensional bosonic superfluid with attractive interactions. Specifically, we focus on the dissipative forces experienced by the soliton due to its interaction with Bogoliubov excitations. Using the collective coordinate approach and the Keldysh formalism, a Langevin equation of motion for the soliton is derived from first principles. The equation contains a stochastic Langevin force (associated with quantum noise) and a nonlocal in time dissipative force, which appears due to inelastic scattering of Bogoliubov quasiparticles off of the moving soliton. It is shown that Ohmic friction (i.e., a term proportional to the soliton's velocity) is absent in the integrable setup. However, the Markovian approximation gives rise to the Abraham-Lorentz force (i.e., a term proportional to the derivative of the soliton's acceleration), which is known from classical electrodynamics of a charged particle interacting with its own radiation. These Abraham-Lorentz equations famously contain a fundamental causality paradox, where the soliton (particle) interacts with excitations (radiation) originating from future events. We show, however, that the causality paradox is an artifact of the Markovian approximation, and our exact non-Markovian dissipative equations give rise to physical trajectories. We argue that the quantum friction discussed here should be observable in current quantum gas experiments.
Under a perfect periodic potential, the electric current density induced by a constant electric field may exhibit nontrivial oscillations, so-called Bloch oscillations, with an amplitude that remains nonzero in the large system size limit. Such oscillations have been well studied for nearly noninteracting particles and observed in experiments. In this work we revisit Bloch oscillations in strongly interacting systems. By analyzing the spin- 12 XXZ chain, we demonstrate that the current density at special values of the anisotropy parameter Δ=−cos(π/p) (p=3,4,5,⋯) in the ferromagnetic gapless regime behaves qualitatively the same as in the noninteracting case (Δ=0) even in the weak electric field limit. When Δ deviates from these values, the amplitude of the oscillation under a weak electric field is suppressed by a factor of the system size. We estimate the strength of the electric field required to observe such a behavior using the Landau-Zener formula.
We study the dynamics of an impurity of finite mass injected into a one-dimensional quantum liquid at zero temperature, either at finite velocity or at zero velocity with a force driving the impurity. We obtain accurate results using numerical simulations based on matrix product states, and find that in both cases, the impurity undergoes oscillations, however the physical mechanism is different: the driven impurity undergoes Bloch oscillations by following the ground state branch while continuously emitting phonons, whereas the undriven impurity undergoes coherent quantum oscillations at an emergent energy scale, called quantum flutter in previous work, whose amplitude grows with increasing initial velocity. We find these results to be independent of whether the system is integrable or not, and robust to changes in the microscopics of the model, suggesting that they are universal.