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Physics World

Quantum gases in optical lattices

Immanuel Bloch

Published Apr 1, 2004• 81 citations
Publisher

Abstract

IMAGINE having an artificial substance in which you can control almost all aspects of the underlying periodic structure and the interactions between the atoms that make up this dream material. Such a substance would allow us to explore a whole range of fundamental phenomena that are extremely difficult – or impossible – to study in real materials. It may sound too good to be true, but over the last two years physicists have come extremely close to achieving this goal.

DOI
10.1088/2058-7058/17/4/32

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IMAGINE having an artificial substance in which you can control almost all aspects of the underlying periodic structure and the interactions between the atoms that make up this dream material. Such a substance would allow us to explore a whole range of fundamental phenomena that are extremely difficult – or impossible – to study in real materials. It may sound too good to be true, but over the last two years physicists have come extremely close to achieving this goal.
In recent years ultracold atomic gases have emerged as a new and promising platform for exploring the physics of quantum many-body systems, allowing researchers to revisit fundamental problems of condensed-matter physics such as superconductivity or magnetism. By trapping ultracold atoms in the periodic potential created by interfering laser beams (a so-called optical lattice), it has indeed become possible to engineer very clean ?materials? whose parameters can be tuned in a wide range. This bottom-up approach comes very close to Feynman?s idea of a ?quantum simulator?, an
Atomic physicists have traditionally studied the properties and interactions of small numbers of atoms and molecules. Condensed-matter physicists, on the other hand, are interested in the behaviour of larger numbers of such particles. In recent years, however the interests of these two groups of physicists have started to converge. Clusters, for example, bridge the gap between small numbers of atoms and the solid state, as do Bose-Einstein condensates – a new form of matter in which millions of atoms collapse into the same quantum state. Many of the laser cooling and trapping techniques that have helped to make Bose-Einstein condensation possible are also being used to explore the interface between atomic and bulk properties in another regime – in the new state of matter found in “optical lattices”.
Ultracold atomic gases trapped at the interference of coherent beams of light constitute an artificial material. This optical lattice material may be used for controlled quantum simulations of condensed matter theories. The bulk of this dissertation concerns the construction and calibration of an optical superlattice that can form the triangular, honeycomb and kagome crystal structures. The properties and geometry of this artificial material may be dynamically changed, allowing for the experiments discussed in this thesis that would be impossible with real materials. The use of ultracold atoms in optical lattices for quantitative tests is challenging because of the novelty of many of the techniques in the field, and because of the myriad experimental differences between these artificial materials and true materials. This thesis reports the development of a method to characterize optical lattice potentials using matter-wave diffraction. We observe an enhancement of inversion asymmetry in matter-wave diffraction from a honeycomb lattice, which we explain using a time-independent perturbative treatment of the single-particle band structure of the lattice. Our experiment also provides new insight into a commonly used detection technique. This thesis culminates in the development and experimental realization of a quantitative test of a condensed-matter theory. The test is insensitive to the experimental differences between artificial materials and real materials. We focus on a prediction from a mean-field treatment of the Bose-Hubbard model that concerns the difference in behavior of itinerant particles on lattices that are identical but for their geometry. Using the tunable geometry of our quantum simulator, we measure the properties of ultracold atomic gases trapped in the triangular and kagome lattices under otherwise identical conditions and find that they are consistent with the mean-field scaling prediction.