arXiv:cond-mat/0305037 · Physical Review Letters
Interaction-Induced Decoherence of Atomic Bloch Oscillations
Andreas Buchleitner, Andrey R. Kolovsky
Abstract
We show that the energy spectrum of the Bose-Hubbard model amended by a static field exhibits Wigner-Dyson level statistics. In itself a characteristic signature of quantum chaos, this induces the irreversible decay of Bloch oscillations of cold, interacting atoms loaded into an optical lattice, and provides a Hamiltonian model for interaction-induced decoherence.