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arXiv:0902.1117 · Physical Review A

Breakdown of adiabaticity when loading ultracold atoms in optical lattices

Jakub Zakrzewski, Dominique Delande

Published Jul 7, 2009• 42 citations
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Abstract

Realistic simulations of current ultracold atom experiments in optical lattices show that the ramping up of the optical lattice is significantly nonadiabatic, implying that experimentally prepared Mott insulators are not really in the ground state of the atomic system. The nonadiabaticity is even larger in the presence of a secondary quasiperiodic lattice simulating ``disorder.'' Alternative ramping schemes are suggested that improve the adiabaticity when the disorder is not too large.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.80.013602

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Realistic simulations of current ultracold atom experiments in optical lattices show that the ramping up of the optical lattice is significantly nonadiabatic, implying that experimentally prepared Mott insulators are not really in the ground state of the atomic system. The nonadiabaticity is even larger in the presence of a secondary quasiperiodic lattice simulating ``disorder.'' Alternative ramping schemes are suggested that improve the adiabaticity when the disorder is not too large.
A large-scale dynamical simulation of the superfluid--Mott-insulator transition in a gas of ultracold atoms placed in an optical lattice is performed using the time-dependent Gutzwiller mean-field approach. This approximate treatment allows us to take into account most of the details of the recent experiment [Greiner et al., Nature (London) 415, 39 (2002)] where by changing the depth of the lattice potential an adiabatic transition from a superfluid to a Mott insulator state has been reported. Our simulations reveal a significant excitation of the system with a transition to insulator in restricted regions of the trap only.
We investigate the effect of the trapping potential on the quantum phases of strongly correlated ultracold bosons in one-dimensional periodic and quasiperiodic optical lattices. By means of a decoupling meanfield approach, we characterize the ground state of the system and its behavior under variation of the harmonic trapping, as a function of the total number of atoms. For a small atom number the system shows an incompressible Mott-insulating phase, as the size of the cloud remains unaffected when the trapping potential is varied. When the quasiperiodic potential is added the system develops a metastable-disordered phase which is neither compressible nor Mott insulating. This state is characteristic of quasidisorder in the presence of a strong trapping potential.
We calculate experimentally relevant properties of trapped fermionic alkaline-earth-metal atoms in an optical lattice, modeled by the SU(N)(N)(N) Hubbard model. We employ a high-temperature expansion that is accurate when the temperature is larger than the tunneling rate, similar to current regimes in ultracold atom experiments. In addition to exploring the Mott insulator-metal crossover, we calculate final temperatures achieved by the standard experimental protocol of adiabatically ramping from a noninteracting gas, as a function of initial gas temperature. Of particular experimental interest, we find that increasing NNN for fixed particle numbers and initial temperatures gives substantially colder Mott insulators after the adiabatic ramping, up to more than a factor of 5 for relevant parameters. This cooling happens for all NNN, fixing the initial entropy, or for all $N\ensuremath{\lesssim}20$ (the exact value depends on dimensionality), at fixed, experimentally relevant initial temperatures.
In the quest to reach lower temperatures of ultracold gases in optical-lattice experiments, nonadiabaticities during lattice loading represent one of the limiting factors that prevent the same low temperatures being reached as in experiments without lattices. Simulating the loading of a bosonic quantum gas into a one-dimensional optical lattice with and without a trap, we find that the redistribution of atomic density inside a global confining potential is by far the dominant source of heating. Based on these results we propose adjusting the trapping potential during loading to minimize changes to the density distribution. Our simulations confirm that a very simple linear interpolation of the trapping potential during loading already significantly decreases the heating of a quantum gas, and we discuss how loading protocols minimizing density redistributions can be designed.
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