No Arabic abstract
We observe the dissipative dynamics of a dense, strongly interacting gas of bosonic atom pairs in an optical lattice, controlling the strength of the two-body interactions over a wide parameter regime. We study how three-body losses contribute to the lattice dynamics, addressing a number of open questions related to the effects of strong dissipation in a many-body system, including the relationship to the continuous quantum Zeno effect. We observe rapid break-up of bound pairs for weak interactions, and for stronger interactions we see doublon decay rates that are asymmetric when changing from attractive and repulsive interactions, and which strongly depend on the interactions and on-site loss rates. By comparing our experimental data with a theoretical analysis of few-body dynamics, we show that these features originate from a non-trivial combination of dissipative dynamics described by a lattice model beyond a standard Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian, and the modification of three-atom dynamics on a single site, which is generated alongside strong three-body loss. Our results open new possibilities for investigating bosonic atoms with strong three-body loss features, and allow for the better understanding of the parameter regimes that are required to realize strong effective three-body interactions.
We investigate the many-body dissipative dynamics of fermionic atoms in an optical lattice in the presence of incoherent light scattering. Deriving and solving a master equation to describe this process microscopically for many particles, we observe contrasting behaviour in terms of the robustness against this type of heating for different many-body states. In particular, we find that the magnetic correlations exhibited by a two-component gas in the Mott insulating phase should be particularly robust against decoherence from light scattering, because the decoherence in the lowest band is suppressed by a larger factor than the timescales for effective superexchange interactions that drive coherent dynamics. Furthermore, the derived formalism naturally generalizes to analogous states with SU(N) symmetry. In contrast, for typical atomic and laser parameters, two-particle correlation functions describing bound dimers for strong attractive interactions exhibit superradiant effects due to the indistinguishability of off-resonant photons scattered by atoms in different internal states. This leads to rapid decay of correlations describing off-diagonal long-range order for these states. Our predictions should be directly measurable in ongoing experiments, providing a basis for characterising and controlling heating processes in quantum simulation with fermions.
We study quantum dynamics of a dark soliton in a one-dimensional Bose gas in an optical lattice within the truncated Wigner approximation. A previous work has revealed that in the absence of quantum fluctuations, dynamical stability of the dark soliton significantly depends on whether its phase kink is located at a lattice site or a link of two neighboring sites. It has also shown that the dark soliton is unstable in a regime of strong quantum fluctuations regardless of the phase-kink position. To bridge the gap between the classical and strongly quantum regimes, we investigate the dynamical stability of the dark soliton in a regime of weak quantum fluctuations. We find that the position dependence of the dynamical stability gradually diminishes and eventually vanishes as the strength of quantum fluctuations increases. This classical-to-quantum crossover of the soliton stability remains even in the presence of a parabolic trapping potential. We suggest that the crossover behavior can be used for experimentally diagnosing whether the instability of a dark soliton is due to quantum fluctuations or classical dynamical instability.
Non-standard Bose-Hubbard models can exhibit rich ground state phase diagrams, even when considering the one-dimensional limit. Using a self-consistent Gutzwiller diagonalisation approach, we study the mean-field ground state properties of a long-range interacting atomic gas in a one-dimensional optical lattice. We first confirm that the inclusion of long-range two-body interactions to the standard Bose-Hubbard model introduces density wave and supersolid phases. However, the introduction of pair and density-dependent tunnelling can result in new phases with two-site periodic density, single-particle transport and two-body transport order parameters. These staggered phases are potentially a mean-field signature of the known novel twisted superfluids found via a DMRG approach [PRA textbf{94}, 011603(R) (2016)]. We also observe other unconventional phases, which are characterised by sign staggered order parameters between adjacent lattice sites.
We investigate the Fermi polaron problem in a spin-1/2 Fermi gas in an optical lattice for the limit of both strong repulsive contact interactions and one dimension. In this limit, a polaronic-like behaviour is not expected, and the physics is that of a magnon or impurity. While the charge degrees of freedom of the system are frozen, the resulting tight-binding Hamiltonian for the impuritys spin exhibits an intriguing structure that strongly depends on the filling factor of the lattice potential. This filling dependency also transfers to the nature of the interactions for the case of two magnons and the important spin balanced case. At low filling, and up until near unit filling, the single impurity Hamiltonian faithfully reproduces a single-band, quasi-homogeneous tight-binding problem. As the filling is increased and the second band of the single particle spectrum of the periodic potential is progressively filled, the impurity Hamiltonian, at low energies, describes a single particle trapped in a multi-well potential. Interestingly, once the first two bands are fully filled, the impurity Hamiltonian is a near-perfect realisation of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model. Our studies, which go well beyond the single-band approximation, that is, the Hubbard model, pave the way for the realisation of interacting one-dimensional models of condensed matter physics.
Ultracold polar molecules provide an excellent platform to study quantum many-body spin dynamics, which has become accessible in the recently realized low entropy quantum gas of polar molecules in an optical lattice. To obtain a detailed understanding for the molecular formation process in the lattice, we prepare a density distribution where lattice sites are either empty or occupied by a doublon composed of a bosonic atom interacting with a fermionic atom. By letting this disordered, out-of-equilibrium system evolve from a well-defined initial condition, we observe clear effects on pairing that arise from inter-species interactions, a higher partial wave Feshbach resonance, and excited Bloch-band population. When only the lighter fermions are allowed to tunnel in the three-dimensional (3D) lattice, the system dynamics can be well described by theory. However, in a regime where both fermions and bosons can tunnel, we encounter correlated dynamics that is beyond the current capability of numerical simulations. Furthermore, we show that we can probe the microscopic distribution of the atomic gases in the lattice by measuring the inelastic loss of doublons. These techniques realize tools that are generically applicable to heteronuclear diatomic systems in optical lattices and can shed light on molecule production as well as dynamics of a Bose-Fermi mixture.