Adiabaticty timescales in Optical Lattices

Stefan S. Natu

Zachary Smith

Ultracold atomic gases are often used as quantum simulators, where the ability to precisely control and modulate the potential landscape allows many model Hamiltonians to be realized. Recently, dynamic control over these potentials has been leveraged to extend the kinds of systems that can be explored. Our lab has constructed an optical lattice generator capable of dynamically altering the spacing, phase, and amplitude of an optical lattice at RF timescales. The rapid timescales allows the construction of a time-averaged disordered potential from individual flashes of optical lattice, producing layered system exhibiting a Griffiths phase. A future experiment where the optical lattice is periodically expanded and contracted is proposed, and a numerical treatment is presented suggesting interesting structure in the tunneling dynamics.

G. F. Xu, Andrew J. Daley

Michael L. Wall, Lincoln D. Carr

We derive a novel lattice Hamiltonian, the molecular Hubbard Hamiltonian , which describes the essential many-body physics of closed-shell ultracold heteronuclear molecules in their absolute ground state in a quasi-one-dimensional optical lattice. The molecular Hubbard Hamiltonian is explicitly time dependent, making a dynamic generalization of the concept of quantum phase transitions necessary. Using the time-evolving block decimation algorithm to study entangled dynamics, we demonstrate that, in the case of hard-core bosonic molecules at half-filling, the molecular Hubbard Hamiltonian exhibits emergent timescales over which spatial entanglement grows, crystalline order appears and oscillations between rotational states self-damp into an asymptotic superposition. We show that these timescales are non-monotonic functions of the physical parameters describing the lattice.

Georg A. Raithel, G. Birkl, William D. Phillips +1 more

Ian B. Spielman, B. A. Brown, P. Lee +3 more