An effective boson Hamiltonian applicable to atomic beam splitters, coupled Bose-Einstein condensates, and optical lattices can be made exactly solvable by including all n-body interactions. The model can include an arbitrary number of boson components. In the strong interaction limit the model becomes a quantum phase model, which also describes a tight-binding lattice particle. Through exact results for dynamic correlation functions, it is shown how the previous weak interaction dynamics of these systems are extended to strong interactions, now becoming relevant in the experiments. The effect of the number of boson components is also analyzed.
An effective boson Hamiltonian applicable to atomic beam splitters, coupled Bose-Einstein condensates, and optical lattices can be made exactly solvable by including all n-body interactions. The model can include an arbitrary number of boson components. In the strong interaction limit the model becomes a quantum phase model, which also describes a tight-binding lattice particle. Through exact results for dynamic correlation functions, it is shown how the previous weak interaction dynamics of these systems are extended to strong interactions, now becoming relevant in the experiments. The effect of the number of boson components is also analyzed.
In this thesis, the physics of trapped, interacting Bose-Einstein condensates is analyzed by solving the many-body Schrödinger equation. Particular emphasis is put on coherence, fragmentation and reduced density matrices. First, the ground state of a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate and its correlation functions are obtained. Then the dynamics of a bosonic Josephson junction is investigated by solving the time-dependent many-body Schrödinger equation numerically exactly. These are the first exact results in literature in this context. It is shown that the standard approximations of the field, Gross-Pitaevskii theory and the Bose-Hubbard model fail at weak interaction strength and within their range of expected validity. For stronger interactions the dynamics becomes strongly correlated and a new equilibration phenomenon is discovered. By comparison with exact results it is shown that a symmetry of the Bose-Hubbard model between attractive and repulsive interactions must be considered an artefact of the model. A conceptual innovation of this thesis are time-dependent Wannier functions. Equations of motion for time-dependent Wannier functions are derived from the variational principle. By comparison with exact results it is shown that lattice models can be greatly improved at little computational cost by letting the Wannier functions of a lattice model become time-dependent.
Ultracold atoms have emerged as an indispensable setting to study quantum many-body systems. Recent experimental and theoretical work has explored the curious phases and novel properties of Bose-Einstein Condensate with optical lattices, and Bose-Einstein Condensate with light-induced artificial spin-orbit coupling. In this thesis, we report our research on these two types of boson systems. In the first topic, in contrast with calculations of bosons in optical lattices that focus on the tight-binding regime, we note that the single-particle states of bosons in a periodic potential generally satisfy the Mathieu equation, and have developed a formalism for studying bosons in an optical lattice using the Mathieu equation. Moreover, based on this formalism, we have proposed a self-consistent scheme for describing interacting bosons in an optical lattice using Hartree Fock approximation. We apply this scheme to quantify the effects of inter-atomic interactions on the properties of bosons in an optical lattice, as exhibited in the comparison between observables of non-interacting and interacting systems, such as the superfluid transition temperature and momentum distribution as probed in time-of-flight expansion. In the second topic, the phases of a Bose-Einstein condensate with light-induced spin-orbit coupling are studied within the mean-field approximation. We obtain the phase diagram at fixed chemical potential and at fixed density for bosons with spin-orbit coupling, finding a regime of phase separation and a regime in which the bosons condensed into a mixed phase. We determine how this phase diagram evolves as a function of the atom interaction parameters and as a function of the strength of light-atom coupling. The mixed phase is found to be stable for sufficiently small light-atom coupling. Specifically, we show that the structure of the phase diagram at fixed chemical potential suggests an unusual density dependence for the mixed phase in a harmonic trapping potential, in which the density of one spin increases with increasing radius, suggesting a unique experimental signature of this state. The collective Bogoliubov sound mode is shown to also provide a signature of the mixed phase, vanishing as the boundary to the regime of phase separation is approached. Together, in these two topics we address the need to enhance the understanding of the unconventional physical properties of Bose-Einstein Condensate in a controlled electromagnetic environment (optical lattices, Raman lasers, etc.), and provide predictions for possible experimental findings.
Ultracold bosonic gases in optical lattices are strongly correlated quantum systems similar to solids. The strong correlation between the electrons in a solid on the one hand, and the bosonic atoms in optical lattice on the other, exhibit various quantum phenomena like insulation, conductivity, localization of electrons and atoms, respectively. Controlled by the intensity of the lattice laser, the ultracold bosonic gas can be transferred from a regime with superfluid character for shallow lattices into a regime of strong correlations, the Mott insulator. As an additional external parameter besides the lattice depth, one can generate spatial inhomogeneities by superimposing an additional standing wave (so-called two-color superlattices), which gives rise to localization effects or the formation of a Bose-glass phase. In the present work, numerical simulations are employed in order to investigate characteristic signatures of the quantum phases in the low-energy excitation spectrum of one-dimensional systems. We simulate temporal small amplitude modulations of the optical lattice in analogy to experiments, and evaluate the response of the system from the time-evolved initial state. The lattice systems are described in the framework of the Bose-Hubbard model. For the evaluation of the time-evolved state, we employ several numerical methods. We analyze systems of small size (6 particles on 6 sites) using an exact time-evolution by integration of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. The formulation of an importance truncation scheme enables us to retain only the relevant components of the model space in the strongly correlated regime and, thus, allows for the investigation of systems with 10 particles on 10 sites using exact time-evolution. Based on this method, we present results of the Mott-insulating regime as well as for the Bose-glass phase. Furthermore, we employ particle-hole methods, which allow for the treatment of systems with experimental lattice sizes and particle numbers. Starting from the equation of motion method we adapt the Tamm-Dancoff approximation as well as the random-phase approximation for the occupation number representation of the Bose-Hubbard model. We present results of simulations of up to 50 particles on 50 sites and discuss the impact of the lattice depth on the low-energy excitations (U-resonance). Moreover, the impact of a two-color superlattice and the variation of its amplitude is investigated.
We present a theoretical study of the condensation of bosons in tight-binding bands corresponding to simple cubic, body-centered cubic, and face-centered cubic lattices. We have analyzed noninteracting bosons, weakly interacting bosons using the Bogoliubov method, and strongly interacting bosons through a renormalized Hamiltonian approach valid for the number of bosons per site less than or equal to unity. In all the cases studied, we find that bosons in a body-centered cubic lattice have the highest Bose condensation temperature. The growth of the condensate fraction of noninteracting bosons is found to be very close to that of free bosons. The interaction partially depletes the condensate at zero temperature and close to it, while enhancing it beyond this range below the Bose-Einstein condensation temperature. Strong interaction enhances the boson effective mass as the band-filling is increased and eventually localizes the bosons to form a Bose-Mott-Hubbard insulator for integer filling.
We formulate a bosonic dynamical mean-field theory (B-DMFT) which provides a comprehensive, thermodynamically consistent framework for the theoretical investigation of correlated lattice bosons. The B-DMFT is applicable for arbitrary values of the coupling parameters and temperature and becomes exact in the limit of high spatial dimensions d or coordination number Z of the lattice. In contrast to its fermionic counterpart, the construction of the B-DMFT requires different scalings of the hopping amplitudes with Z depending on whether the bosons are in their normal state or in the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). A detailed discussion of how this conceptual problem can be overcome by performing the scaling in the action rather than in the Hamiltonian itself is presented. The B-DMFT treats normal and condensed bosons on equal footing and thus includes the effects caused by their dynamic coupling. It reproduces all previously investigated limits in parameter space, such as the Beliaev-Popov and Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov approximations, and generalizes the existing mean-field theories of interacting bosons. The self-consistency equations of the B-DMFT are those of a bosonic single-impurity coupled to two reservoirs corresponding to bosons in the condensate and in the normal state, respectively. We employ the B-DMFT to solve a model of itinerant and localized, interacting bosons analytically. The local correlations are found to enhance the condensate density and the BEC transition temperature TBEC. This effect may be used experimentally to increase TBEC of bosonic atoms in optical lattices.
Motivated by current experiments with ultracold atoms, the study of complex dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates in optical lattices forms the central subject of this work. A lattice model of interacting bosons under the influence of an external force is motivated and derived from the experimental setup. Several dynamical regimes of this model are discussed in this thesis. In a first part we will develop a new measure for detecting avoided crossings in complex energy spectra and apply it to the quantum chaotic regime of the single-band system. The second and main part of this work is dedicated to the coupling between energy bands described in terms of a two-band model. The complex time evolution is already apparent in the horizontal and vertical population dynamics of the non-interacting problem. We find resonances in the interband transport, and, in a second step, study the effect of inter-particle interactions on these resonant oscillations. We are able to predict all time scales of the complex interband dynamics even in the presence of interactions. This is possible via the introduction of an effective model that is motivated and supported by a multitude of numerical results and proves exactly solvable.