Quantum Transport of a 1D Degenerate Bose Gas in a Lattice: The Role of Different Quantum Fluctuations

Ana María Rey, Julio R. Gea-Banacloche, Guido Pupillo +2 more

Janne Ruostekoski, Lorenzo Isella

A. Isihara

Chad Fertig, K. O’Hara, J. H. Huckans +3 more

We report the observation of strongly damped dipole oscillations of a quantum degenerate 1D atomic Bose gas in a combined harmonic and optical lattice potential. Damping is significant for very shallow axial lattices (0.25 photon recoil energies), and increases dramatically with increasing lattice depth, such that the gas becomes nearly immobile for times an order of magnitude longer than the single-particle tunneling time. Surprisingly, we see no broadening of the atomic quasimomentum distribution after damped motion. Recent theoretical work suggests that quantum fluctuations can strongly damp dipole oscillations of a 1D atomic Bose gas, providing a possible explanation for our observations.

William Band

Yvan Castin

We first consider an exactly solvable classical field model to understand the coherence properties and the density fluctuations of a one-dimensional (1D) weakly interacting degenerate Bose gas with repulsive interactions at temperatures larger than the chemical potential. In a second part, using a lattice model for the quantum field, we explain how to carefully generalize the usual Bogoliubov approach to study a degenerate and weakly interacting Bose gas in 1D, 2D or 3D in the regime of weak density fluctuations. In the last part, using the mapping to an ideal Fermi gas in second quantized formalism, we calculate and discuss physically the density fluctuations and the coherence properties of a gas of impenetrable bosons in 1D.