Abstract This article provides a synopsis of our recent experimental work exploring Bose–Einstein condensation in metastable higher Bloch bands of optical lattices. Bipartite lattice geometries have allowed us to implement appropriate band structures, which meet three basic requirements: the existence of metastable excited states sufficiently protected from collisional band relaxation, a mechanism to excite the atoms initially prepared in the lowest band with moderate entropy increase, and the possibility of cross-dimensional tunneling dynamics, necessary to establish coherence along all lattice axes. A variety of bands can be selectively populated and a subsequent thermalization process leads to the formation of a condensate in the lowest energy state of the chosen band. As examples the 2nd, 4th and 7th bands in a bipartite square lattice are discussed. The geometry of the 2nd and 7th bands can be tuned such that two inequivalent energetically degenerate energy minima arise at the X ± -points at the edge of the 1st Brillouin zone. In this case even a small interaction energy is sufficient to lock the phase between the two condensation points such that a complex-valued chiral superfluid order parameter can emerge, which breaks time reversal symmetry. In the 4th band a condensate can be formed at the Γ-point in the center of the 1st Brillouin zone, which can be used to explore topologically protected band touching points. The new techniques to access orbital degrees of freedom in higher bands greatly extend the class of many-body scenarios that can be explored with bosons in optical lattices.
We study the formation and collision-aided decay of an ultracold atomic Bose-Einstein condensate in the first excited band of a double-well two-dimensional optical lattice with weak harmonic confinement in the perpendicular
z direction. This lattice geometry is based on an experiment by Wirth et al. [Nat. Phys. 7, 147 (2010)]. The double well is asymmetric, with the local ground state in the shallow well nearly degenerate with the first excited state of the adjacent deep well. We compare the band structure obtained from a tight-binding model with that obtained numerically using a plane-wave basis. We find the tight-binding model to be in quantitative agreement for the lowest two bands, in qualitative agreement for the next two bands, and inadequate for even higher excited bands. The bandwidths of the excited bands are much larger than the harmonic-oscillator energy spacing in the
z direction. We then study the thermodynamics of a noninteracting Bose gas in the first excited band. We estimate the condensate fraction and critical temperature
Tc as functions of the lattice parameters. For typical atom numbers, the critical energy
kBTc, with
kB the Boltzmann constant, is larger than the excited bandwidths and harmonic-oscillator energy. Using conservation of total energy and atom number, we show that the temperature increases after the lattice transformation. Finally, we estimate the time scale for a two-body collision-aided decay of the condensate as a function of the lattice parameters. The decay involves two processes, the dominant one in which both colliding atoms decay to the ground band, and the second involving excitation of one atom to a higher band. For this estimate, we have used tight-binding wave functions for the lowest four bands and numerical estimates for higher bands. The decay rate rapidly increases with lattice depth, but close to the critical temperature, it stays smaller than the tunneling rate between the
s and
p orbitals in adjacent wells.
We study the formation of a chiral mode in a one-dimensional bipartite optical potential with a double-well dispersion. The geometry of the first excited state is tuned such that two degenerate energy minima are formed at the quasimomentum $q=\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}\ensuremath{\hbar}{k}_{0}/2$ of the first Brillouin zone. Based on the coupled-mode theory, an unconventional superfluid order ${p}_{q}\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}i{p}_{\ensuremath{-}q}$ is formed between the interacting condensate components within the double-well dispersion band under well-defined phase-locked steady states.
We predict novel interband physics for bosons in double-well optical lattices (OLs). An intrinsic coupling between the
s and the
px bands due to interaction gives rise to larger Mott regions on the phase diagram at even fillings than the ones at odd fillings. On the other hand, the ground state can form various types of condensates, including a mixture of single-particle condensates of both bands, a mixture of a single-particle condensate of one band and a pair condensate of the other band, and a pair condensate composed of one particle from one band and one hole from the other band. The predicted phenomena should be observable in current experiments on double-well OLs.
We investigate the interaction-driven instability of a quadratic band crossing arising for ultracold bosonic atoms loaded into a two-dimensional optical lattice. We consider the case when the degenerate point becomes a local minimum of both crossing energy bands such that it can support a stable Bose--Einstein condensate. A repulsive contact interaction among the condensed bosons induces a spontaneously time-reversal-symmetry broken superfluid phase and a topological gap is opened in the excitation spectrum. We propose two concrete realizations of the desired quadratic band crossing in lattices with either fourfold or sixfold rotational symmetries via suitable tuning of the unit cell leading to reduced Brillouin zones and correspondingly folded bands. In either case, topologically protected edge excitations are found for a finite system.
In this work, we consider excited many-body mean-field states of bosons in a double-well optical lattice by investigating stationary Bloch solutions to the nonlinear equations of motion. We show that, for any positive interaction strength, a loop structure emerges at the edge of the band structure whose existence is entirely due to interactions. This can be contrasted to the case of a conventional optical (Bravais) lattice where a loop appears only above a critical repulsive interaction strength. Motivated by the possibility of realizing such nonlinear Bloch states experimentally, we analyze the collective excitations about these nonlinear stationary states and thereby establish conditions for the system's energetic and dynamical stability. We find that there are regimes that are dynamically stable and thus apt to be realized experimentally.