Entanglement is an essential property of quantum many-body systems. However, its local detection is challenging and was so far limited to spin degrees of freedom in ion chains. Here we measure entanglement between the spins of atoms located on two lattice sites in a one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard chain which features both local spin- and particle-number fluctuations. Starting with an initially localized spin impurity, we observe an outwards propagating entanglement wave and show quantitatively how entanglement in the spin sector rapidly decreases with increasing particle-number fluctuations in the chain.
We investigate the quantum measurement noise effects on the dynamics of an atomic Bose lattice gas inside an optical resonator. We describe the dynamics by means of a hybrid model consisting of a Bose--Hubbard Hamiltonian for the atoms and a Heisenberg--Langevin equation for the lossy cavity field mode. We assume that the atoms are prepared initially in the ground state of the lattice Hamiltonian and then start to interact with the cavity mode. We show that the cavity field fluctuations originating from the dissipative outcoupling of photons from the resonator lead to vastly different effects in the different possible ground state phases, i.e., the superfluid, the supersolid, the Mott- and the charge-density-wave phases. In the former two phases with the presence of a superfluid wavefunction, the quantum measurement noise appears as a driving term leading to excess noise depletion of the ground state. The time scale for the system to leave the ground scale is determined analytically. For the latter two incompressible phases, the quantum noise results in the fluctuation of the chemical potential. We derive an analytical expression for the corresponding broadening of the quasiparticle resonances.
Ultracold atoms in optical lattices offer a great promise to generate entangled states for scalable quantum information processing owing to the inherited long coherence time and controllability over a large number of particles. We report on the generation, manipulation and detection of atomic spin entanglement in an optical superlattice. Employing a spin-dependent superlattice, atomic spins in the left or right sites can be individually addressed and coherently manipulated by microwave pulses with near unitary fidelities. Spin entanglement of the two atoms in the double wells of the superlattice is generated via dynamical evolution governed by spin superexchange. By observing collisional atom loss with in-situ absorption imaging we measure spin correlations of atoms inside the double wells and obtain the lower boundary of entanglement fidelity as $0.79pm0.06$, and the violation of a Bells inequality with $S=2.21pm 0.08$. The above results represent an essential step towards scalable quantum computation with ultracold atoms in optical lattices.
We study the dynamics of an interacting Bose-Hubbard chain coupled to a non-Markovian environment. Our basic tool is the reduced generating functional expressed as a path integral over spin-coherent states. We calculate the leading contribution to the corresponding effective action, and by minimizing it, we derive mean-field equations that can be numerically solved. With this tool at hand, we examine the influence of the systems initial conditions and interparticle interactions on the dissipative dynamics. Moreover, we investigate the presence of memory effects due to the non-Markovian environment.
Ultracold atoms in optical lattices provide a unique opportunity to study Bose- Hubbard physics. In this work we show that by considering a spatially varying onsite interaction it is possible to manipulate the motion of excitations above the Mott phase in a Bose-Hubbard system. Specifically, we show that it is possible to engineer regimes where excitations will negatively refract, facilitating the construction of a flat lens.
We address the effects of quenched disorder averaging in the time-evolution of systems of ultracold atoms in optical lattices in the presence of noise, imposed by of an environment. For bosonic systems governed by the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian, we quantify the response of disorder in Hamiltonian parameters in terms of physical observables, including bipartite entanglement in the ground state and report the existence of disorder-induced enhancement in weakly interacting cases. For systems of two-species fermions described by the Fermi-Hubbard Hamiltonian, we find similar results. In both cases, our dynamical calculations show no appreciable change in the effects of disorder from that of the initial state of the evolution. We explain our findings in terms the statistics of the disorder in the parameters and the behaviour of the observables with the parameters.