No Arabic abstract
The phenomenon of metastability can shape dynamical processes on all temporal and spatial scales. Here, we induce metastable dynamics by pumping ultracold bosonic atoms from the lowest band of an optical lattice to an excitation band, via a sudden quench of the unit cell. The subsequent relaxation process to the lowest band displays a sequence of stages, which include a metastable stage, during which the atom loss from the excitation band is strongly suppressed. Using classical-field simulations and analytical arguments, we provide an explanation for this experimental observation, in which we show that the transient condensed state of the atoms in the excitation band is a dark state with regard to collisional decay and tunneling to a low-energy orbital. Therefore the metastable state is stabilized by destructive interference due to the chiral phase pattern of the condensed state. Our experimental and theoretical study provides a detailed understanding of the different stages of a paradigmatic example of many-body relaxation dynamics.
In this paper we first compute the out-of-time-order correlators (OTOC) for both a phenomenological model and a random-field XXZ model in the many-body localized phase. We show that the OTOC decreases in power law in a many-body localized system at the scrambling time. We also find that the OTOC can also be used to distinguish a many-body localized phase from an Anderson localized phase, while a normal correlator cannot. Furthermore, we prove an exact theorem that relates the growth of the second Renyi entropy in the quench dynamics to the decay of the OTOC in equilibrium. This theorem works for a generic quantum system. We discuss various implications of this theorem.
The breaking of time reversal symmetry via the spontaneous formation of chiral order is ubiquitous in nature. Here, we present an unambiguous demonstration of this phenomenon for atoms Bose-Einstein condensed in the second Bloch band of an optical lattice. As a key tool we use a matter wave interference technique, which lets us directly observe the phase properties of the superfluid order parameter and allows us to reconstruct the spatial geometry of certain low energy excitations, associated with the formation of domains of different chirality. Our work marks a new era of optical lattices where orbital degrees of freedom play an essential role for the formation of exotic quantum matter, similarly as in electronic systems.
In recent years, one important experimental achievement was the strong coupling of quantum matter and quantum light. Realizations reach from ultracold atomic gases in high-finesse optical resonators to electronic systems coupled to THz cavities. The dissipative nature of the quantum light field and the global coupling to the quantum matter leads to many exciting phenomena such as the occurrence of dissipative quantum phase transition to self-organized exotic phases. The theoretical treatment of these dissipative hybrid systems of matter coupled to a cavity field is very challenging. Previously, often mean-field approaches were applied which characterize the emergence of self-organized phases as a zero-temperature transition for the particles, a ground-state Dicke transition. Here we develop a new approach which combines a mean-field approach with a perturbative treatment of fluctuations beyond mean-field, which becomes exact in the thermodynamic limit. We argue that these fluctuations are crucial in order to determine the mixed state (finite temperature) character of the transition and to unravel universal properties of the self-organized states. We validate our results by comparing to time-dependent matrix-product-state calculations.
It is often computationally advantageous to model space as a discrete set of points forming a lattice grid. This technique is particularly useful for computationally difficult problems such as quantum many-body systems. For reasons of simplicity and familiarity, nearly all quantum many-body calculations have been performed on simple cubic lattices. Since the removal of lattice artifacts is often an important concern, it would be useful to perform calculations using more than one lattice geometry. In this work we show how to perform quantum many-body calculations using auxiliary-field Monte Carlo simulations on a three-dimensional body-centered cubic (BCC) lattice. As a benchmark test we compute the ground state energy of 33 spin-up and 33 spin-down fermions in the unitary limit, which is an idealized limit where the interaction range is zero and scattering length is infinite. As a fraction of the free Fermi gas energy $E_{rm FG}$, we find that the ground state energy is $E_0/E_{rm FG}= 0.369(2), 0.371(2),$ using two different definitions of the finite-system energy ratio. This is in excellent agreement with recent results obtained on a cubic lattice cite{He:2019ipt}. We find that the computational effort and performance on a BCC lattice is approximately the same as that for a cubic lattice with the same number of lattice points. We discuss how the lattice simulations with different geometries can be used to constrain the size lattice artifacts in simulations of continuum quantum many-body systems.
Caustics are a striking phenomena in natural optics and hydrodynamics: high-amplitude characteristic patterns that are singular in the short wavelength limit. We use exact numerical and approximate semiclassical analytic methods to study quant