In an effort to address integrability breaking in cold gas experiments, we extend the integrable hydrodynamics of the Lieb-Liniger model with two additional components representing the population of atoms in the first and second transverse excited states, thus enabling a description of quasi-1D condensates. Collisions between different components are accounted for through the inclusion of a Boltzmann-type collision integral in the hydrodynamic equation. Contrary to standard generalized hydrodynamics, our extended model captures thermalization of the condensate at a rate consistent with experimental observations from a quantum Newton's cradle setup.
In an effort to address integrability breaking in cold gas experiments, we extend the integrable hydrodynamics of the Lieb-Liniger model with two additional components representing the population of atoms in the first and second transverse excited states, thus enabling a description of quasi-1D condensates. Collisions between different components are accounted for through the inclusion of a Boltzmann-type collision integral in the hydrodynamic equation. Contrary to standard generalized hydrodynamics, our extended model captures thermalization of the condensate at a rate consistent with experimental observations from a quantum Newton's cradle setup.
We study ultra-cold bosons out of equilibrium in a one-dimensional (1D) setting and probe the breaking of integrability and the resulting relaxation at the onset of the crossover from one to three dimensions. In a quantum Newton's cradle type experiment, we excite the atoms to oscillate and collide in an array of 1D tubes and observe the evolution for up to 4.8 seconds (400 oscillations) with minimal heating and loss. By investigating the dynamics of the longitudinal momentum distribution function and the transverse excitation, we observe and quantify a two-stage relaxation process. In the initial stage single-body dephasing reduces the 1D densities, thus rapidly drives the 1D gas out of the quantum degenerate regime. The momentum distribution function asymptotically approaches the distribution of quasimomenta (rapidities), which are conserved in an integrable system. In the subsequent long time evolution, the 1D gas slowly relaxes towards thermal equilibrium through the collisions with transversely excited atoms. Moreover, we tune the dynamics in the dimensional crossover by initializing the evolution with different imprinted longitudinal momenta (energies). The dynamical evolution towards the relaxed state is quantitatively described by a semiclassical molecular dynamics simulation.
Describing and understanding the motion of quantum gases out of equilibrium is one of the most important modern challenges for theorists. In the groundbreaking Quantum Newton Cradle experiment [Kinoshita, Wenger and Weiss, Nature 440, 900 (2006)], quasi-one-dimensional cold atom gases were observed with unprecedented accuracy, providing impetus for many developments on the effects of low dimensionality in out-of-equilibrium physics. But it is only recently that the theory of generalized hydrodynamics has provided the adequate tools for a numerically efficient description. Using it, we give a complete numerical study of the time evolution of an ultracold atomic gas in this setup, in an interacting parameter regime close to that of the original experiment. We evaluate the full evolving phase-space distribution of particles. We simulate oscillations due to the harmonic trap, the collision of clouds without thermalization, and observe a small elongation of the actual oscillation period and cloud deformations due to many-body dephasing. We also analyze the effects of weak anharmonicity. In the experiment, measurements are made after release from the one-dimensional trap. We evaluate the gas density curves after such a release, characterizing the actual time necessary for reaching the asymptotic state where the integrable quasi-particle momentum distribution function emerges.
Integrability in one dimension prevents quantum thermalization and gives rise to rich many-body phenomena described by generalized hydrodynamics, which have been extensively studied over the past two decades using cold atoms in optically confined tubes. However, experimental work to date has focused primarily on low-energy states. Here, we report the experimental observation and theoretical understanding of near-integrable effects on thermalization in highly excited states. We design a protocol to prepare atoms within a high-energy window by combining a harmonic trap and a weak optical lattice: a Bose-Einstein condensate is initially prepared away from the trap center via Wannier-Stark localization and subsequently emits atoms into a selected energy window of highly excited states via Landau-Zener tunneling. By reconstructing the Wigner functions from the density distribution using a machine learning algorithm, we find that it takes an exceptionally long time, up to several seconds, for these atoms to gradually thermalize from an approximately microcanonical ensemble toward a canonical ensemble. We develop a modified Boltzmann equation that captures weak integrability breaking, yielding good agreement between theory and experiment. Our results extend the understanding of integrability and thermalization in low-dimensional quantum systems.
In conventional fluids, it is well known that Euler-scale equations are plagued by ambiguiti es and instabilities. In one dimension smooth initial conditions may develop shocks, and weak solutions, such as for domain wall initial conditions (the paradigmatic Riemann problem of hydrodynamics), are not unique (and must be supplemented by physically motivated conditions such as non-negative entropy production). The absence of shock formation experimentally observed in quasi-one-dimensional cold-atomic gases, which are described by the Lieb-Liniger model, provides perhaps the strongest pointer to a modification of the hydrodynamic equation due to integrability. Generalized hydrodynamics (GHD) is the required hydrodynamic theory, taking into account the infinite number of conserved quantities afforded by integrability. We provide a new quadrature for the GHD equation—a solution in terms of a Banach fixed-point problem where time has been explicitly integrated. The quadrature is an efficient numerical solution tool; and it allows us, in the Lieb-Liniger model, to rigorously show that no shock may appear at all times, and, when combined with recent hydrodynamic fluctuation theories, to obtain new expressions for correlations in nonstationary states, establishing for the first time the presence of discontinuities that are fundamental to the nonequilibrium physics of integrable systems.
Generalized hydrodynamics (GHD) is a recent theoretical approach that is becoming a go-to tool for characterizing out-of-equilibrium phenomena in integrable and near-integrable quantum many-body systems. Here, we benchmark its performance against an array of alternative theoretical methods, for an interacting one-dimensional Bose gas described by the Lieb-Liniger model. In particular, we study the evolution of both a localized density bump and dip, along with a quantum Newton's cradle setup, for various interaction strengths and initial equilibrium temperatures. We find that GHD generally performs very well at sufficiently high temperatures or strong interactions. For low temperatures and weak interactions, we highlight situations where GHD, while not capturing interference phenomena on short lengthscales, can describe a coarse-grained behaviour based on convolution averaging that mimics finite imaging resolution in ultracold atom experiments. In a quantum Newton's cradle setup based on a double-well to single-well trap quench, we find that GHD with diffusive corrections demonstrates excellent agreement with the predictions of a classical field approach.
Abstract We review the recent theoretical and experimental progress regarding the generalized hydrodynamics (GHD) behavior of the one-dimensional (1D) Bose gas with contact repulsive interactions, also known as the Lieb–Liniger gas. In the first section, we review the theory of the Lieb–Liniger gas, introducing the key notions of the rapidities and of the rapidity distribution. The latter characterizes the Lieb–Liniger gas after relaxation and is at the heart of GHD. We also present the asymptotic regimes of the Lieb–Liniger gas with their dedicated approximate descriptions. In the second section we enter the core of the subject and review the theoretical results of GHD in 1D Bose gases. The third and fourth sections are dedicated to experimental results obtained in cold atom experiments: the experimental realization of the Lieb–Liniger model is presented in section 3, with a selection of key results for systems at equilibrium, and section 4 presents the experimental tests of the GHD theory. In section 5 we review the effects of atom losses, which, assuming slow loss processes, can be described within the GHD framework. We conclude with a few open questions.