Time-Dependent Correlation Functions for the Bimodal Bose–Hubbard Model

Gilson Vieira Soares, J. G. Peixoto de Faria, G. Q. Pellegrino +1 more

Kaspar Sakmann

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.

J. M. P. Carmelo, D. Baeriswyl, X. Zotos

Uwe R. Fischer, Ralf Schützhold, Michael Uhlmann

By means of an adapted mean-field expansion for large fillings $n⪢1$, we study the evolution of quantum fluctuations in the time-dependent Bose-Hubbard model, starting in the superfluid state and approaching the Mott phase by decreasing the tunneling rate or increasing the interaction strength in time. For experimentally relevant cases, we derive analytical results for the temporal behavior of the number and phase fluctuations, respectively. This allows us to calculate the growth of the quantum depletion and the decay of off-diagonal long-range order. We estimate the conditions for the observability of the time dependence in the correlation functions in the experimental setups with external trapping present. Finally, we discuss the analogy to quantum effects in the early universe during the inflationary epoch.

Malcolm P. Kennett, Matthew Fitzpatrick

Dragan Marković, Mihailo Čubrović

We study the evolution of two-point correlation functions of the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model in the semiclassical regime in the framework of truncated Wigner approximation with quantum jumps as first-order corrections. At early times, the correlation functions show strong superdiffusion with universal integer exponents determined solely by the initial conditions and completely insensitive to system parameters and chaos. Only after a long time does this regime crosse over to the normal diffusion regime which is most robust when nonintegrability is strong. For strong nonintegrability, the system ends up in a homogeneous state, while for weak nonintegrability, the oscillations and inhomogeneities persist, despite the fact that chaos is nearly always strong and only weakly depends on the nonintegrability parameter. We conclude that the superdiffusive regime is neither prethermalized nor a precursor to thermalization but an early-time phenomenon related to a special scaling symmetry of the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian.