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Physical Review Letters

Exploring a Metal-Insulator Transition with Ultracold Atoms in Standing Light Waves?

Klaus Stefan Drese, Martin Holthaus

Published Apr 14, 1997• 58 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We suggest the possibility to realize an optical quasicrystal with ultracold atoms in far-detuned, bichromatic standing light waves. If the optical potentials created by the individual light waves have sufficiently different strength, one obtains an atom-optical realization of Harper's model. This model exhibits a metal-insulator transition at a certain value of the site-to-site hopping integral. Since this hopping integral is effectively renormalized by an additional oscillating force, one can switch from the regime of extended states to the regime of localized states by varying the amplitude of that force.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.78.2932

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We suggest the possibility to realize an optical quasicrystal with ultracold atoms in far-detuned, bichromatic standing light waves. If the optical potentials created by the individual light waves have sufficiently different strength, one obtains an atom-optical realization of Harper's model. This model exhibits a metal-insulator transition at a certain value of the site-to-site hopping integral. Since this hopping integral is effectively renormalized by an additional oscillating force, one can switch from the regime of extended states to the regime of localized states by varying the amplitude of that force.
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.
We recapitulate the principle enabling the phenomenon of dynamic localization, and provide model calculations for ultracold atoms in driven optical lattices which indicate that the localization effect remains almost unaffected by interband transitions if the parameters are chosen carefully. In addition, we suggest to exploit the underlying quasienergy band collapse for coherently controlling the metal-insulator transition that occurs in the Harper model, as realized with quasiperiodic optical lattices.
We study the ground state properties of ultracold fermions trapped in a one-dimensional double-well optical lattice by using the density-matrix renormalization group method. The system is described by an extended Hubbard model with alternating hopping integrals and an external harmonic confining potential. We clarify the characteristic features of the metal–insulator phase transition originating from the double-well structure of the lattices. Several different types of insulating regions coexist when the number of atoms at each site is an integer or a half integer. We found that each insulating phase except for a band insulator exhibits rather large local density fluctuations, reflecting the strong dimerization of atoms within the unit cells of double-well lattices. The phase characteristics are elucidated in detail by investigating the profiles of the local density of atoms, the local density (spin) fluctuations, the double-occupancy probability and the spatially extended sp in correlations.
In this thesis I report on experiments that enter a new regime in the many body physics of ultracold atomic gases. A Bose-Einstein condensate is loaded into a three-dimensional optical lattice potential formed by a standing wave laser light field. In this novel quantum system we have been able to both realize a quantum phase transition from a superfluid to a Mott insulator, and to observe the collapse and revival of a macroscopic matter wave field. Quantum phase transitions are driven by quantum fluctuations and occur, even at zero temperature, as the relative strength of two competing energy terms in the underlying Hamiltonian is varied across a critical value. In the first part of this work I report on the observation of such a quantum phase transition in a Bose-Einstein condensate with repulsive interactions, held in a three-dimensional optical lattice potential. In the superfluid ground state, each atom is spread-out over the entire lattice, whereas in the Mott insulating state, exact numbers of atoms are localized at individual lattice sites. We observed the reversible transition between those states and detected the gap in the excitation spectrum of the Mott insulator. A Bose-Einstein condensate is usually described by a macroscopic matter wave field. However, a quantized field underlies such a "classical" matter wave field of a Bose-Einstein condensate. The striking behavior of ultracold matter due to the field quantization and the nonlinear interactions between the atoms is the focus of the second part of this work. The matter wave field of a Bose-Einstein condensate is observed to undergo a series of collapses and revivals as time evolves. Furthermore, we show that the collisions between individual pairs of atoms lead to a fully coherent collisional phase shift in the corresponding many-particle state, which is a crucial cornerstone of proposed novel quantum computation schemes with neutral atoms. With these experiments we enter a new field of physics with ultracold quantum gases. In this strongly correlated regime, interactions between atoms dominate the behavior of the many-body system such that it can no longer be described by the usual theories for weakly interacting Bose gases. This novel quantum system offers the unique possibility to experimentally address fundamental questions of modern solid state physics, atomic physics, quantum optics, and quantum information.
We investigate theoretically light scattering of photons by ultracold atoms in an optical lattice in the linear regime. A full quantum theory for the atom-photon interactions is developed as a function of the atomic state in the lattice along the Mott-insulator--superfluid phase transition, and the photonic-scattering cross section is evaluated as a function of the energy and of the direction of emission. The predictions of this theory are compared with the theoretical results of a recent work on Bragg scattering in time-of-flight measurements [A.M. Rey et al., Phys. Rev. A 72, 023407 (2005)]. We show that, when performing Bragg spectroscopy with light scattering, the photon recoil gives rise to an additional atomic site-to-site hopping, which can interfere with ordinary tunneling of matter waves and can significantly affect the photonic-scattering cross section.