We experimentally and numerically investigate the expansion of initially localized ultracold bosons in homogeneous one- and two-dimensional optical lattices. We find that both dimensionality and interaction strength crucially influence these nonequilibrium dynamics. While the atoms expand ballistically in all integrable limits, deviations from these limits dramatically suppress the expansion and lead to the appearance of almost bimodal cloud shapes, indicating diffusive dynamics in the center surrounded by ballistic wings. For strongly interacting bosons, we observe a dimensional crossover of the dynamics from ballistic in the one-dimensional hard-core case to diffusive in two dimensions, as well as a similar crossover when higher occupancies are introduced into the system.
We experimentally and numerically investigate the expansion of initially localized ultracold bosons in homogeneous one- and two-dimensional optical lattices. We find that both dimensionality and interaction strength crucially influence these nonequilibrium dynamics. While the atoms expand ballistically in all integrable limits, deviations from these limits dramatically suppress the expansion and lead to the appearance of almost bimodal cloud shapes, indicating diffusive dynamics in the center surrounded by ballistic wings. For strongly interacting bosons, we observe a dimensional crossover of the dynamics from ballistic in the one-dimensional hard-core case to diffusive in two dimensions, as well as a similar crossover when higher occupancies are introduced into the system.
We investigate the expansion of bosons and fermions in a homogeneous lattice after a sudden removal of the trapping potential using exact numerical methods. As a main result, we show that in one dimension, both bosonic and fermionic Mott insulators expand with the same velocity, irrespective of the interaction strength, provided the expansion starts from the ground state of the trapped gas. Furthermore, their density profiles become identical during the expansion; the asymptotic density dynamics is identical to that of initially localized, noninteracting particles, and the asymptotic velocity distribution is flat. The expansion velocity for initial correlated Mott insulating states is therefore independent of the interaction strength and particle statistics. Interestingly, this nonequilibrium dynamics is sensitive to the interaction driven quantum phase transition in the Bose-Hubbard model; while being constant in the Mott phase, the expansion velocity decreases in the superfluid phase and vanishes for large systems in the noninteracting limit. These results are compared to the setup of a recent experiment [Ronzheimer et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 205301 (2013)], where the trap opening was combined with an interaction quench from infinitely strong interactions to finite values. In the latter case, the interaction quench breaks the universal dynamics in the asymptotic regime and the expansion depends on the interaction strength. We carry out an analogous analysis for a two-component Fermi gas, with similar observations. In addition, we study the effect of breaking the integrability of hard-core bosons in different ways; while the fast ballistic expansion from the ground state of Mott insulators in one dimension remains unchanged for finite interactions, we observe strong deviations from this behavior on a two-leg ladder even in the hard-core case. This change in dynamics bares similarities with the dynamics in the dimensional crossover from one to two dimensions observed in the aformentioned experimental study.
We investigate the transport properties in out-of-equilibrium dynamics of strongly correlated dipolar fermions initially localized in one-dimensional inhomogeneous optical lattice. The dynamics is studied by experimentally measurable dynamical variables such as one-body density, pair-correlation function and size of the expanding cloud. In the noninteracting limit, we trace the usual fingerprints of ballistic expansion in the short time dynamics. However, dynamics is strongly affected by system size due to Pauli principle. The dynamics also exhibits significant dependence on the sign of the interactions. We observe that strong repulsive dipolar interaction gives rise to many-body features in the dynamics, while strong attractive dipolar interaction leads to stabilized cluster states. Intermediate dipolar interaction are found to hinder expansion of correlations, while very strong dipolar interaction favors expansion of the cloud. Our work show the effect of dipolar interaction in the transport properties of interacting fermions, that can be studied in on-going experiments with ultracold dipolar fermions.
We study the temporal expansion of an ultracold Bose gas in two-dimensional, square optical lattices. The gas is described by the Bose-Hubbard model deep in the superfluid regime, with initially all bosons condensed in the central site of the lattice. We use the previously developed nonequilibrium propagator method for capturing the time evolution of an interacting bosonic system, where the many-body Hamiltonian is represented in an appropriate local basis and the corresponding field operators are separated into the classical (BEC) part and quantum mechanical fluctuations. After a quench, i.e. after a sudden switch of the lattice nearest-neighbor hopping, the expanding, bosonic cloud separates spatially into a fast, ballistic forerunner and a slowly expanding central part controlled by selftrapping. We show that the forerunner expansion is driven by the coherent dynamics of the BEC and that its velocity is consistent with the Lieb-Robinson bound. For smaller lattices we analyze how quasiparticle collisions lead to enhanced condensate depletion and oscillation damping.
We study the temporal expansion of an ultracold Bose gas in two-dimensional square optical lattices. The gas is described by the Bose-Hubbard model deep in the superfluid regime, with initially all bosons condensed in the central site of the lattice. We use the previously developed nonequilibrium propagator method for capturing the time evolution of an interacting bosonic system, where the many-body Hamiltonian is represented in an appropriate local basis and the corresponding field operators are separated into the classical [Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC)] part and quantum mechanical fluctuations. After a quench, i.e., after a sudden switch of the lattice nearest-neighbor hopping, the expanding bosonic cloud separates spatially into a fast ballistic forerunner and a slowly expanding central part controlled by self-trapping. We show that the forerunner expansion is driven by the coherent dynamics of the BEC and that its velocity is consistent with the Lieb-Robinson bound. For smaller lattices we analyze how quasiparticle collisions lead to enhanced condensate depletion and oscillation damping.
We study the spatiotemporal dynamics of interacting bosons on a two-dimensional Hubbard lattice in the strongly interacting regime, taking into account the dynamics of condensate amplitude as well as the direct transport of noncondensed fluctuations. To that end we develop a self-consistent density-matrix approach which goes beyond the standard Gutzwiller mean-field theory. Starting from the Liouville-von-Neumann equation we derive a quantum master equation for the time evolution of the system's local density matrix at each lattice site, with a dynamical bath that represents the rest of the system. We apply this method to the expansion dynamics of an initially prepared cloud of interacting bosons in an optical lattice. We observe a ballistic expansion of the condensate, as expected, followed by slow, diffusive transport of the normal bosons. We discuss, in particular, the robustness of the Mott insulator phase as well as its melting due to incoherent transport. The method should be applicable to various models of lattice bosons in the strongly correlated regime.
We numerically investigate the expansion of clouds of hard-core bosons in the two-dimensional square lattice using a matrix-product-state--based method. This nonequilibrium setup is induced by quenching the trapping potential to zero and our work is specifically motivated by a recent experiment with interacting bosons in an optical lattice [Ronzheimer et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 205301 (2013)]. As the anisotropy of the amplitudes Jx and Jy for hopping in different spatial directions is varied from the one- to the two-dimensional case, we observe a crossover from a fast ballistic expansion in the one-dimensional limit ${J}_{x}\ensuremath{\gg}{J}_{y}$ to much slower dynamics in the isotropic two-dimensional limit Jx=Jy. We further study the dynamics on multileg ladders and long cylinders. For these geometries we compare the expansion of a cloud to the melting of a domain wall, which helps us to identify several different regimes of the expansion as a function of time. By studying the dependence of expansion velocities on both the anisotropy Jy/Jx and the number of legs, we observe that the expansion on two-leg ladders, while similar to the two-dimensional case, is slower than on wider ladders. We provide a qualitative explanation for this observation based on an analysis of the rung spectrum.