No Arabic abstract
Quantum degenerate gases trapped in optical lattices are ideal testbeds for fundamental physics because these systems are tunable, well characterized, and isolated from the environment. Controlled disorder can be introduced to explore suppression of quantum diffusion in the absence of conventional dephasing mechanisms such as phonons, which are unavoidable in experiments on electronic solids. Recent experiments use transport of degenerate Fermi gases in optical lattices (Kondov et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 083002 (2015)) to probe a particularly extreme regime of strong interaction in what can be modeled as an Anderson-Hubbard model. These experiments find evidence for an intriguing insulating phase where quantum diffusion is completely suppressed by strong disorder. Quantitative interpretation of these experiments remains an open problem that requires inclusion of non-zero entropy, strong interaction, and trapping. We argue that the suppression of transport can be thought of as localization of Hubbard-band quasiparticles. We construct a theory of transport of Hubbard-band quasiparticles tailored to trapped optical lattice experiments. We compare the theory directly with center-of-mass transport experiments of Kondov et al. with no fitting parameters. The close agreement between theory and experiments shows that the suppression of transport is only partly due to finite entropy effects. We argue that the complete suppression of transport is consistent with Anderson localization of Hubbard-band quasiparticles. The combination of our theoretical framework and optical lattice experiments offers an important platform for studying localization in isolated many-body quantum systems.
Ultracold atoms in optical lattices offer a unique platform for investigating disorder-driven phenomena. While static disordered site potentials have been explored in a number of optical lattice experiments, a more general control over site-energy and off-diagonal tunneling disorder has been lacking. The use of atomic quantum states as synthetic dimensions has introduced the spectroscopic, site-resolved control necessary to engineer new, more tailored realizations of disorder. Here, by controlling laser-driven dynamics of atomic population in a momentum-space lattice, we extend the range of synthetic-dimension-based quantum simulation and present the first explorations of dynamical disorder and tunneling disorder in an atomic system. By applying static tunneling phase disorder to a one-dimensional lattice, we observe ballistic quantum spreading as in the case of uniform tunneling. When the applied disorder fluctuates on timescales comparable to intersite tunneling, we instead observe diffusive atomic transport, signaling a crossover from quantum to classical expansion dynamics. We compare these observations to the case of static site-energy disorder, where we directly observe quantum localization in the momentum-space lattice.
Originally, the Hubbard model has been derived for describing the behaviour of strongly-correlated electrons in solids. However, since over a decade now, variations of it are also routinely being implemented with ultracold atoms in optical lattices. We review some of the rich literature on this subject, with a focus on more recent non-standard forms of the Hubbard model. After an introduction to standard (fermionic and bosonic) Hubbard models, we discuss briefly common models for mixtures, as well as the so called extended Bose-Hubbard models, that include interactions between neighboring sites, next-neighboring sites, and so on. The main part of the review discusses the importance of additional terms appearing when refining the tight-binding approximation on the original physical Hamiltonian. Even when restricting the models to the lowest Bloch band is justified, the standard approach neglects the density-induced tunneling (which has the same origin as the usual on-site interaction). The importance of these contributions is discussed for both contact and dipolar interactions. For sufficiently strong interactions, also the effects related to higher Bloch bands become important even for deep optical lattices. Different approaches that aim at incorporating these effects, mainly via dressing the basis Wannier functions with interactions, leading to effective, density-dependent Hubbard-type models, are reviewed. We discuss also examples of Hubbard-like models that explicitly involve higher $p$-orbitals, as well as models that couple dynamically spin and orbital degrees of freedom. Finally, we review mean-field nonlinear-Schrodinger models of the Salerno type that share with the non-standard Hubbard models the nonlinear coupling between the adjacent sites. In that part, discrete solitons are the main subject of the consideration. We conclude by listing some future open problems.
We numerically investigate, using the time evolving block decimation algorithm, the quantum transport of ultra-cold bosonic atoms in a double well optical lattice through slow and periodic modulation of the lattice parameters (intra- and inter-well tunneling, chemical potential, etc.). The transport of atoms does not depend on the rate of change of the parameters (as along as the change is slow) and can distribute atoms in optical lattices at the quantized level without involving external forces. The transport of atoms depends on the atom filling in each double well and the interaction between atoms. In the strongly interacting region, the bosonic atoms share the same transport properties as non-interacting fermions with quantized transport at the half filling and no atom transport at the integer filling. In the weakly interacting region, the number of the transported atoms is proportional to the atom filling. We show the signature of the quantum transport from the momentum distribution of atoms that can measured in the time of flight image. A semiclassical transport model is developed to explain the numerically observed transport of bosonic atoms in the non-interacting and strongly interacting limits. The scheme may serve as an quantized battery for atomtronics applications.
We observe interband transitions mediated by the dipole-dipole interaction for an array of 1D quantum gases of chromium atoms, trapped in a 2D optical lattice. Interband transitions occur when dipolar relaxation releases an energy which matches or overcomes the lattice band gap. We analyze the role of tunneling in higher lattice bands on this process. We compare the experimental dipolar relaxation rate with a calculation based on a multiple Fermi Golden Rule approach, when the lattice sites are symmetric, and the magnetic field is parallel to the lattice axis. We also show that an almost complete suppression of dipolar relaxation is obtained below a magnetic field threshold set by the depth of the lattice: 1D quantum gases in an excited Zeeman state then become metastable.
We study three-leg-ladder optical lattices loaded with repulsive atomic Bose-Einstein condensates and subjected to artificial gauge fields. By employing the plane-wave analysis and variational approach, we analyze the band-gap structure of the energy spectrum and reveal the exotic swallow-tail loop structures in the energy-level anti-crossing regions due to an interplay between the atom-atom interaction and artificial gauge field. Also, we discover stable discrete solitons residing in a semi-infinite gap above the highest band, these discrete solitons are associated with the chiral edge currents.