No Arabic abstract
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.
Following the experimental realization of Dicke superradiance in Bose gases coupled to cavity light fields, we investigate the behavior of ultra cold fermions in a transversely pumped cavity. We focus on the equilibrium phase diagram of spinless fermions coupled to a single cavity mode and establish a zero temperature transition to a superradiant state. In contrast to the bosonic case, Pauli blocking leads to lattice commensuration effects that influence self-organization in the cavity light field. This includes a sequence of discontinuous transitions with increasing atomic density and tricritical superradiance. We discuss the implications for experiment.
The superfluid to Mott insulator transition and the superradiant transition are textbook examples for quantum phase transition and coherent quantum optics, respectively. Recent experiments in ETH and Hamburg succeeded in loading degenerate bosonic atomic gases in optical lattices inside a cavity, which enables the first experimental study of the interplay between these two transitions. In this letter we present the theoretical phase diagram for the ETH experimental setup, and determine the phase boundaries and the orders of the phase transitions between the normal superfluid phase, the superfluid with superradiant light, the normal Mott insulator and the Mott insulator with superradiant light. We find that in contrast to the second-order superradiant transition in a weakly interacting Bose condensate, strong correlations in the superfluid nearby a Mott transition can render the superradiant transition to a first order one. Our results will stimulate further experimental studies of interactions between cavity light and strongly interacting quantum matters.
We theoretically consider ultracold polar molecules in a wave guide. The particles are bosons, they experience a periodic potential due to an optical lattice oriented along the wave guide and are polarised by an electric field orthogonal to the guide axis. The array is mechanically unstable by opening the transverse confinement in the direction orthogonal to the polarizing electric field and can undergo a transition to a double-chain (zigzag) structure. For this geometry we derive a multi-mode generalized Bose-Hubbard model for determining the quantum phases of the gas at the mechanical instability taking into account the quantum fluctuations in all directions of space. Our model limits the dimension of the numerically relevant Hilbert subspace by means of an appropriate decomposition of the field operator, which is obtained from a field theoretical model of the linear-zigzag instability. We determine the phase diagrams of small systems using exact diagonalization and find that, even for tight transverse confinement, the aspect ratio between the two transverse trap frequencies controls not only the classical but also the quantum properties of the ground state in a non-trivial way. Convergence tests at the linear-zigzag instability demonstrate that our multi-mode generalized Bose-Hubbard model can catch the essential features of the quantum phases of dipolar gases in confined geometries with a limited computational effort.
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.