We consider the particle-hole excitation energy for the insulator state of an ultracold atomic Bose system created by increasing non-adiabatically the depth of an optical lattice. We give the analytical expression of this excitation energy, and it is found that the excitation energy is quite different from that of the ordinary Mott insulator state created by adiabatically increasing the depth of the optical lattice. This difference physically arises from the different particle-number fluctuations in the lattice sites for the insulator state created adiabatically or non-adiabatically.
We consider the particle-hole excitation energy for the insulator state of an ultracold atomic Bose system created by increasing non-adiabatically the depth of an optical lattice. We give the analytical expression of this excitation energy, and it is found that the excitation energy is quite different from that of the ordinary Mott insulator state created by adiabatically increasing the depth of the optical lattice. This difference physically arises from the different particle-number fluctuations in the lattice sites for the insulator state created adiabatically or non-adiabatically.
We study single-particle excitations of a Bose gas in an optical lattice in the Mott-insulator phase. The characteristic feature of the single-particle spectrum in the Mott-insulator phase is the existence of an energy gap between the particle and hole excitations. We show that the single-particle excitation energies and associated energy gap in the Mott-insulator phase can be directly probed by an output-coupling experiment. We apply the general expression for the output current derived by Luxat and Griffin, which is given in terms of the single-particle Green's functions of a trapped Bose gas, to the Mott-insulator phase using the Bose-Hubbard model. The energy spectrum of the momentum-resolved output current exhibits two characteristic peaks corresponding to the particle and hole excitations, and thus it can be used to detect the transition point from the Mott insulator to superfluid phase where the energy gap disappears.
An optical lattice is a periodic potential for atoms, created using a standing wave pattern of light. Due to the interaction between the light and the atoms, the atoms are attracted to either the nodes or the anti-nodes of the standing wave, depending on the exact wave lenght of the light. This means that if such a lattice is loaded with a sufficiently high number of ultracold atoms, a periodic array of atoms is obtained, we an interatomic distance of a few tenths of a micrometer. In order to obtain such a high number of cold atoms, one first has to create a so-called Bose-Einstein condensate. When an optical lattice is loaded from a Bose-Einstein condensate, it is possible to create a system in which every atom is in the lowest band of the lattice and there is on average one atom in each lattice site. Because the lattice potential is created with laser light, the depth of the lattice can easily be tuned by changing the intensity of the laser. When the intensity of the laser light is low, the atoms can tunnel from one site to the next. Due to this tunneling, the gas of atoms in the lattice will remain superfluid. However, if the intensity of the laser light is increased to above a certain critical value, a quantum phase transition occurs to a so-called Mott insulator. In this state, the atoms can no longer tunnel due to the fact that the on-site interaction between atoms becomes more important then the tunneling probability. In this PhD thesis, a description is given of the experimental setup that is being constructed in our group to create these systems in our lab. Also, a theoretical description is given of these systems and several important quantities our derived, such as the gap of the Mott-insulating state. Furthermore, an experiment is proposed that can be used to accurately measure this gap.
A large-scale dynamical simulation of the superfluid--Mott-insulator transition in a gas of ultracold atoms placed in an optical lattice is performed using the time-dependent Gutzwiller mean-field approach. This approximate treatment allows us to take into account most of the details of the recent experiment [Greiner et al., Nature (London) 415, 39 (2002)] where by changing the depth of the lattice potential an adiabatic transition from a superfluid to a Mott insulator state has been reported. Our simulations reveal a significant excitation of the system with a transition to insulator in restricted regions of the trap only.
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 study Bragg spectroscopy of ultracold atoms in one-dimensional optical lattices as a method for probing the excitation spectrum in the Mott-insulator phase, in particular the one-particle-hole excitation band. Within the framework of perturbation theory we obtain an analytical expression for the dynamic structure factor and use it to calculate the imparted energy which was shown to be a relevant observable in recent experiments. We test the accuracy of our approximations by comparing them with numerically exact solutions of the Bose-Hubbard model in restricted cases and establish the limits of validity of our linear-response analysis. Finally we show that when the system is deep in the Mott-insulator regime, its response to the Bragg perturbation is temperature dependent. We suggest that this dependence might be used as a tool to probe temperatures of order of the Mott gap.
In recent years ultracold atoms in optical lattices have been extensively employed as quantum simulators to study the physics of conventional solid state systems. Due to the possibility of introducing controlled disorder, it appears now a straightforward progression to use ultracold atoms in optical potentials to also study the physics of complex systems. We experimentally study a system of bosonic 87Rb atoms in a 3D optical lattice, where disorder is introduced on the length scale of the lattice sites by using an auxiliary optical lattice with a non‐commensurate wavelength. Increasing the amount of disorder, we observe the transition from a Mott Insulator state to a novel gapless insulating phase induced by the cooperation of interactions and disorder, which could be identified with a Bose Glass phase. We discuss the experimental results as well as possible additional techniques for a better diagnostic of the system and future implementations of the two‐color lattices in the study of different disorder‐induced phenomena.