No Arabic abstract
We study the early-time dynamics of a degenerate Bose gas after a sudden quench of the interaction strength, starting from a weakly interacting gas. By making use of a time-dependent generalization of the Nozi`eres-Saint-James variational formalism, we describe the crossover of the early-time dynamics from shallow to deep interaction quenches. We analyze the coherent oscillations that characterize both the density of excited states and the Tans contact as a function of the final scattering length. For shallow quenches, the oscillatory behaviour is negligible and the dynamics is universally governed by the healing length and the mean-field interaction energy. By increasing the final scattering length to intermediate values, we reveal a universal regime where the period of the coherent atom-molecule oscillations is set by the molecule binding energy. For the largest scattering lengths we can numerically simulate in the unitary regime, we find a universal scaling behaviour of the typical growth time of the momentum distribution in agreement with recent experimental observations [C. Eigen et al., Nature 563, 221 (2018)].
We prepare and study strongly interacting two-dimensional Bose gases in the superfluid, the classical Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition, and the vacuum-to-superfluid quantum critical regimes. A wide range of the two-body interaction strength 0.05 < g < 3 is covered by tuning the scattering length and by loading the sample into an optical lattice. Based on the equations of state measurements, we extract the coupling constants as well as critical thermodynamic quantities in different regimes. In the superfluid and the BKT transition regimes, the extracted coupling constants show significant down-shifts from the mean-field and perturbation calculations when g approaches or exceeds one. In the BKT and the quantum critical regimes, all measured thermodynamic quantities show logarithmic dependence on the interaction strength, a tendency confirmed by the extended classical-field and renormalization calculations.
We address the physics of equilibration in ultracold atomic gases following a quench of the interaction parameter. We focus on the momentum distribution of the excitations, $n_{mathbf k}$, and observe that larger ${mathbf k}$ modes will equilibrate faster, as has been claimed in recent experimental work. We identify three time regimes. At short times $n_{mathbf k}$ exhibits oscillations; these are damped out at intermediate times where the system appears to be in a false-equilibrium. Finally, at longer times, full equilibration occurs. This false-equilibrium is associated with the necessarily slower relaxation of the condensate which sufficiently high ${mathbf k}$-states (of the excitation response) will then quasi-adiabatically follow. Our work bears on the recent literature focus on interaction quench experiments. We take issue with the fact that theories to date assume that the oscillatory regime is adequate for addressing experiments.
When an impurity is immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate, impurity-boson interactions are expected to dress the impurity into a quasiparticle, the Bose polaron. We superimpose an ultracold atomic gas of $^{87}$Rb with a much lower density gas of fermionic $^{40}$K impurities. Through the use of a Feshbach resonance and RF spectroscopy, we characterize the energy, spectral width and lifetime of the resultant polaron on both the attractive and the repulsive branches in the strongly interacting regime. The width of the polaron in the attractive branch is narrow compared to its binding energy, even as the two-body scattering length formally diverges.
The dynamics of strongly interacting many-body quantum systems are notoriously complex and difficult to simulate. A new theory, generalized hydrodynamics (GHD), promises to efficiently accomplish such simulations for nearly-integrable systems. It predicts the evolution of the distribution of rapidities, which are the momenta of the quasiparticles in integrable systems. GHD was recently tested experimentally for weakly interacting atoms, but its applicability to strongly interacting systems has not been experimentally established. Here we test GHD with bundles of one-dimensional (1D) Bose gases by performing large trap quenches in both the strong and intermediate coupling regimes. We measure the evolving distribution of rapidities, and find that theory and experiment agree well over dozens of trap oscillations, for average dimensionless coupling strengths that range from 0.3 to 9.3. By also measuring momentum distributions, we gain experimental access to the interaction energy and thus to how the quasiparticles themselves evolve. The accuracy of GHD demonstrated here confirms its wide applicability to the simulation of nearly-integrable quantum dynamical systems. Future experimental studies are needed to explore GHD in spin chains, as well as the crossover between GHD and regular hydrodynamics in the presence of stronger integrability breaking perturbations.
Understanding strongly correlated phases of matter, from the quark-gluon plasma to neutron stars, and in particular the dynamics of such systems, $e.g.$ following a Hamiltonian quench, poses a fundamental challenge in modern physics. Ultracold atomic gases are excellent quantum simulators for these problems, thanks to tuneable interparticle interactions and experimentally resolvable intrinsic timescales. In particular, they give access to the unitary regime where the interactions are as strong as allowed by quantum mechanics. Following years of experiments on unitary Fermi gases, unitary Bose gases have recently emerged as a new experimental frontier. They promise exciting new possibilities, including universal physics solely controlled by the gas density and novel forms of superfluidity. Here, through momentum- and time-resolved studies, we explore both degenerate and thermal homogeneous Bose gases quenched to unitarity. In degenerate samples we observe universal post-quench dynamics in agreement with the emergence of a prethermal state with a universal nonzero condensed fraction. In thermal gases, dynamic and thermodynamic properties generically depend on both the gas density $n$ and temperature $T$, but we find that they can still be expressed in terms of universal dimensionless functions. Surprisingly, the total quench-induced correlation energy is independent of the gas temperature. Our measurements provide quantitative benchmarks and new challenges for theoretical understanding.