We study the dynamics of an ultracold gas of interacting bosons confined in a one-dimensional potential composed of
n wells. We derive an effective
N-particle Hamiltonian for this system that describes the tunneling of particles between adjacent wells and that includes the interactions among the particles within the same well. The problem is discussed in the light of current research on optical lattices. We demonstrate that the effective Hamiltonian gives the possibility of studying the transition from an ideal insulator to a real conductor when the parameters that modulate the interaction and the tunneling of the particles are varied. To show this we numerically solve Schr\"odinger equation for the case of
n=3 wells. We find that for a given number of particles it is possible to establish a weak- and a strong-interaction regime. In the limit of strong interaction the tunneling term can be neglected. One important result in our analysis is that in the weak-interaction regime the system reaches a stationary state as a result of the loss of coherence in the transport of particles through the wells.
We report the observation of a universal behavior of ultracold quantum critical (QC) Bose gases trapped in a one-dimensional optical lattice. We extract the density probability distributions from the measured atomic density of the rubidium Bose gases after a free expansion time. The density probability is found to follow a simple exponential law once the lattice system has entered the QC region above the Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless transition. We show that, in addition to relative phase fluctuations between the subcondensates in different lattice wells, there also exist spatial phase fluctuations within single lattice wells in this QC region. The universal density-probability distribution can thus be well understood by a simple theoretical model taking into account these two kinds of phase fluctuations.