No Arabic abstract
We study the scattering of a matter-wave from an interacting system of bosons in an optical lattice, focusing on the strong-interaction regime. Analytical expressions for the many-body scattering cross section are derived from a strong-coupling expansion and a site-decoupling mean-field approximation, and compared to numerically obtained exact results. In the thermodynamic limit, we find a non-vanishing inelastic cross section throughout the Mott insulating regime, which decays quadratically as a function of the boson-boson interaction.
We study the scattering of matter-waves from interacting bosons in a one-dimensional optical lattice, described by the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian. We derive analytically a formula for the inelastic cross section as a function of the atomic interaction in the lattice, employing Bogoliubovs formalism for small condensate depletion. A linear decay of the inelastic cross section for weak interaction, independent of number of particles, condensate depletion and system size, is found.
Disorder, prevalent in nature, is intimately involved in such spectacular effects as the fractional quantum Hall effect and vortex pinning in type-II superconductors. Understanding the role of disorder is therefore of fundamental interest to materials research and condensed matter physics. Universal behavior, such as Anderson localization, in disordered non-interacting systems is well understood. But, the effects of disorder combined with strong interactions remains an outstanding challenge to theory. Here, we experimentally probe a paradigm for disordered, strongly-correlated bosonic systems-the disordered Bose-Hubbard (DBH) model-using a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of ultra-cold atoms trapped in a completely characterized disordered optical lattice. We determine that disorder suppresses condensate fraction for superfluid (SF) or coexisting SF and Mott insulator (MI) phases by independently varying the disorder strength and the ratio of tunneling to interaction energy. In the future, these results can constrain theories of the DBH model and be extended to study disorder for strongly-correlated fermionic particles.
Mean-field dynamics of strongly interacting bosons described by hard core bosons with nearest-neighbor attraction has been shown to support two species of solitons: one of Gross-Pitaevskii (GP-type) where the condensate fraction remains dark and a novel non-Gross-Pitaevskii-type (non-GP-type) characterized by brightening of the condensate fraction. Here we study the effects of quantum fluctuations on these solitons using the adaptive time-dependent density matrix renormalization group method, which takes into account the effect of strong correlations. We use local observables as the density, condensate density and correlation functions as well as the entanglement entropy to characterize the stability of the initial states. We find both species of solitons to be stable under quantum evolution for a finite duration, their tolerance to quantum fluctuations being enhanced as the width of the soliton increases. We describe possible experimental realizations in atomic Bose Einstein Condensates, polarized degenerate Fermi gases, and in systems of polar molecules on optical lattices.
We present the first experimental evidence supporting the postulation that an optical-dipole potential in a condensate undergoing superradiant scattering modifies the structure factor of the system and significantly impacts the scattering. Several consequences of this new detuning-dependent mechanism are discussed and verified experimentally. Our experiments indicate that whenever the generation and propagation growth of a new field are significant, the dynamic response of the condensate can have a profound impact on the scattering process.
We study matter wave scattering from an ultracold, many body atomic system trapped in an optical lattice. We determine the angular cross section that a matter wave probe sees and show that it is strongly affected by the many body phase, superfluid or Mott insulator, of the target lattice. We determine these cross sections analytically in the first Born approximation, and we examine the variation at intermediate points in the phase transition by numerically diagonalizing the Bose Hubbard Hamiltonian for a small lattice. We show that matter wave scattering offers a convenient method for non-destructively probing the quantum many body phase transition of atoms in an optical lattice.