No Arabic abstract
Using a species-selective dipole potential, we create initially localized impurities and investigate their interactions with a majority species of bosonic atoms in a one-dimensional configuration during expansion. We find an interaction-dependent amplitude reduction of the oscillation of the impurities size with no measurable frequency shift, and study it as a function of the interaction strength. We discuss possible theoretical interpretations of the data. We compare, in particular, with a polaronic mass shift model derived following Feynman variational approach.
By quenching the strength of interactions in a partially condensed Bose gas we create a super-saturated vapor which has more thermal atoms than it can contain in equilibrium. Subsequently, the number of condensed atoms ($N_0$) grows even though the temperature ($T$) rises and the total atom number decays. We show that the non-equilibrium evolution of the system is isoenergetic and for small initial $N_0$ observe a clear separation between $T$ and $N_0$ dynamics, thus explicitly demonstrating the theoretically expected two-step picture of condensate growth. For increasing initial $N_0$ values we observe a crossover to classical relaxation dynamics. The size of the observed quench-induced effects can be explained using a simple equation of state for an interacting harmonically-trapped atomic gas.
We study the ground state of a one-dimensional (1D) trapped Bose gas with two mobile impurity particles. To investigate this set-up, we develop a variational procedure in which the coordinates of the impurity particles are slow-like variables. We validate our method using the exact results obtained for small systems. Then, we discuss energies and pair densities for systems that contain of the order of one hundred atoms. We show that bosonic non-interacting impurities cluster. To explain this clustering, we calculate and discuss induced impurity-impurity potentials in a harmonic trap. Further, we compute the force between static impurities in a ring ({it {`a} la} the Casimir force), and contrast the two effective potentials: the one obtained from the mean-field approximation, and the one due to the one-phonon exchange. Our formalism and findings are important for understanding (beyond the polaron model) the physics of modern 1D cold-atom systems with more than one impurity.
We study the dynamics of a dilute Bose gas at zero temperature following a sudden quench of the scattering length from a noninteracting Bose condensate to unitarity (infinite scattering length). We apply three complementary approaches to understand the momentum distribution and loss rates. First, using a time-dependent variational ansatz for the many-body state, we calculate the dynamics of the momentum distribution. Second, we demonstrate that, at short times and large momenta compared to those set by the density, the physics can be well understood within a simple, analytic two-body model. We derive a quantitative prediction for the evolution of Tans contact, which increases linearly at short times. We also study the three-body losses at finite densities. Consistent with experiments, we observe lifetimes which are long compared to the dynamics of large momentum modes.
Understanding the relaxation process is the most important unsolved problem in non-equilibrium quantum physics. Current understanding primarily concerns on if and how an isolated quantum many-body system thermalize. However, there is no clear understanding of what conditions and on which time-scale do thermalization occurs. In this article, we simulate the quench dynamics of one-dimensional Bose gas in an optical lattice from an{it {ab initio}} perspective by solving the time-dependent many-boson Schrodinger equation using the multi-configurational time-dependent Hartree method for bosons (MCTDHB). We direct a superfluid (SF) to Mott-insulator (MI) transition by performing two independent quenches: an interaction quench when the interaction strength is changed instantaneously, and a lattice depth quench where the depth of the lattice is altered suddenly. We show that although the Bose-Hubbard model predicts identical physics, the general many-body treatment shows significant differences between the two cases. We observe that lattice depth quench exhibits a large time-scale to reach the MI state and shows an oscillatory phase collapse-revival dynamics and a complete absence of thermalization that reveals through the analysis of the time-evolution of the reduced one-body density matrix, two-body density, and entropy production. In contrast, the interaction quench shows a swift transition to the MI state and shows a clear signature of thermalization for strong quench values. We provide a physical explanation for these differences and prescribe an analytical fitting formula for the time required for thermalization.
We present a theoretical treatment of coherent light scattering from an interacting 1D Bose gas at finite temperatures. We show how this can provide a nondestructive measurement of the atomic system states. The equilibrium states are determined by the temperature and interaction strength, and are characterized by the spatial density-density correlation function. We show how this correlation function is encoded in the angular distribution of the fluctuations of the scattered light intensity, thus providing a sensitive, quantitative probe of the density-density correlation function and therefore the quantum state of the gas.