We report the experimental observation of St{u}ckelberg oscillations of matter waves in optical lattices. Extending previous work on Landau-Zener tunneling of Bose-Einstein condensates in optical lattices, we study the effects of the accumulated phase between two successive crossings of the Brillouin zone edge. Our results agree well with a simple model for multiple Landau-Zener tunneling events taking into account the band structure of the optical lattice.
We numerically investigate some properties of unbalanced St{u}ckelberg holographic superconductors, by considering backreaction effects of fields on the background geometry. More precisely, we study the impacts of the chemical potential mismatch and St{u}ckelberg mechanism on the condensation and conductivity types (electrical, spin, mixed, thermo-electric, thermo-spin and thermal conductivity). Our results show that the St{u}ckelbergs model parameters $C_{alpha}$ and $alpha$ not only have significant impacts on the phase transition, but also affect the conductivity pseudo-gap and the strength of conductivity fluctuations. Moreover, the effects of these parameters on a system will be gradually reduced as the imbalance grows. We also find that the influence of $alpha$ on the amplitude of conductivity fluctuations depends on the magnitude of the both $C_{alpha}$ and $deltamu/mu$ in the electric and thermal conductivity cases. This results in that increasing $alpha$ can damp the conductivity fluctuations of an unbalanced system in contrast to balanced ones.
We discuss the method for the measurement of the gravity acceleration g by means of Bloch oscillations of an accelerated BEC in an optical lattice. This method has a theoretical critical point due to the fact that the period of the Bloch oscillations depends, in principle, on the initial shape of the BEC wavepacket. Here, by making use of the nearest-neighbor model for the numerical analysis of the BEC wavefunction, we show that in real experiments the period of the Bloch oscillations does not really depend on the shape of the initial wavepacket and that the relative uncertainty, due to the fact that the initial shape of the wavepacket may be asymmetrical, is smaller than the one due to experimental errors. Furthermore, we also show that the relation between the oscillation period and the scattering length of the BECs atoms is linear; this fact suggest us a new experimental procedure for the measurement of the scattering length of atoms.
We systematically investigate the non-Hermitian generalisations of the Landau-Zener (LZ) transition and the Landau-Zener-St{u}ckelberg (LZS) interferometry. The LZ transition probabilities, or band populations, are calculated for a generic non-Hermitian model and their asymptotic behaviour analysed. We then focus on non-Hermitian systems with a real adiabatic parameter and study the LZS interferometry formed out of two identical avoided level crossings. Four distinctive cases of interferometry are identified and the analytic formulae for the transition probabilities are calculated for each case. The differences and similarities between the non-Hermitian case and its Hermitian counterpart are emphasised. In particular, the geometrical phase originated from the sign change of the mass term at the two level crossings is still present in the non-Hermitian system, indicating its robustness against the non-Hermiticity. We further apply our non-Hermitian LZS theory to describing the Bloch oscillation in one-dimensional parity-time $(mathcal{PT})$ reversal symmetric non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model and propose an experimental scheme to simulate such dynamics using photonic waveguide arrays. The Landau-Zener transition, as well as the LZS interferometry, can be visualised through the beam intensity profile and the transition probabilitiess measured by the centre of mass of the profile.
Using the quantum collapse and revival phenomenon of a Bose--Einstein condensate in three-dimensional optical lattices, the atom number statistics on each lattice site are experimentally investigated. We observe an interaction driven time evolution of on-site number fluctuations in a constant lattice potential with the collapse and revival time ratio as the figure of merit. Through a shortcut loading procedure, we prepare a three-dimensional array of coherent states with Poissonian number fluctuations. The following dynamics clearly show the interaction effect on the evolution of the number fluctuations from Poissonian to sub-Poissonian. Our method can be used to create squeezed states which are important in precision measurement.
This tutorial is a theoretical work, in which we study the physics of ultra-cold dipolar bosonic gases in optical lattices. Such gases consist of bosonic atoms or molecules that interact via dipolar forces, and that are cooled below the quantum degeneracy temperature, typically in the nK range. When such a degenerate quantum gas is loaded into an optical lattice produced by standing waves of laser light, new kinds of physical phenomena occur. These systems realize then extended Hubbard-type models, and can be brought to a strongly correlated regime. The physical properties of such gases, dominated by the long-range, anisotropic dipole-dipole interactions, are discussed using the mean-field approximations, and exact Quantum Monte Carlo techniques (the Worm algorithm).