No Arabic abstract
Quantum antiferromagnets are of broad interest in condensed matter physics as they provide a platform for studying exotic many-body states including spin liquids and high-temperature superconductors. Here, we report on the creation of a one-dimensional Heisenberg antiferromagnet with ultracold bosons. In a two-component Bose-Hubbard system, we switch the sign of the spin-exchange interaction and realize the isotropic antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model in an extended 70-site chain. Starting from a low-entropy Neel-ordered state, we use optimized adiabatic passage to approach the bosonic antiferromagnet. We demonstrate the establishment of antiferromagnetism by probing the evolution of the staggered magnetization and spin correlations of the system. Compared with condensed matter systems, ultracold gases in optical lattices can be microscopically engineered and measured, offering significant advantages for exploring bosonic magnetism and spin dynamics.
We propose and realize a deeply sub-wavelength optical lattice for ultracold neutral atoms using $N$ resonantly Raman-coupled internal degrees of freedom. Although counter-propagating lasers with wavelength $lambda$ provided two-photon Raman coupling, the resultant lattice-period was $lambda/2N$, an $N$-fold reduction as compared to the conventional $lambda/2$ lattice period. We experimentally demonstrated this lattice built from the three $F=1$ Zeeman states of a $^{87}{rm Rb}$ Bose-Einstein condensate, and generated a lattice with a $lambda/6= 132 {rm nm}$ period from $lambda=790 {rm nm}$ lasers. Lastly, we show that adding an additional RF coupling field converts this lattice into a superlattice with $N$ wells uniformly spaced within the original $lambda/2$ unit cell.
We unravel the ground state properties and the non-equilibrium quantum dynamics of two bosonic impurities immersed in an one-dimensional fermionic environment by applying a quench of the impurity-medium interaction strength. In the ground state, the impurities and the Fermi sea are phase-separated for strong impurity-medium repulsions while they experience a localization tendency around the trap center for large attractions. We demonstrate the presence of attractive induced interactions mediated by the host for impurity-medium couplings of either sign and analyze the competition between induced and direct interactions. Following a quench to repulsive interactions triggers a breathing motion in both components, with an interaction dependent frequency and amplitude for the impurities, and a dynamical phase-separation between the impurities and their surrounding for strong repulsions. For attractive post-quench couplings a beating pattern owing its existence to the dominant role of induced interactions takes place with both components showing a localization trend around the trap center. In both quench scenarios, attractive induced correlations are manifested between non-interacting impurities and are found to dominate the direct ones only for quenches to attractive couplings.
Tunneling in a many-body system appears as one of the novel implications of quantum physics, in which particles move in space under an otherwise classically-forbidden potential barrier. Here, we theoretically describe the quantum dynamics of the tunneling phenomenon of a few intricate bosonic clouds in a closed system of a two-dimensional symmetric double-well potential. We examine how the inclusion of the transverse direction, orthogonal to the junction of the double-well, can intervene in the tunneling dynamics of bosonic clouds. We use a well-known many-body numerical method, called the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree for bosons (MCTDHB) method. MCTDHB allows one to obtain accurately the time-dependent many-particle wavefunction of the bosons which in principle entails all the information of interest about the system under investigation. We analyze the tunneling dynamics by preparing the initial state of the bosonic clouds in the left well of the double-well either as the ground, longitudinally or transversely excited, or a vortex state. We unravel the detailed mechanism of the tunneling process by analyzing the evolution in time of the survival probability, depletion and fragmentation, and the many-particle position, momentum, and angular-momentum expectation values and their variances. As a general rule, all objects lose coherence while tunneling through the barrier and the states which include transverse excitations do so faster. Implications are briefly discussed.
We theoretically propose and experimentally demonstrate the use of motional sidebands in a trapped ensemble of $^{87}$Rb atoms to engineer tunable long-range XXZ spin models. We benchmark our simulator by probing a ferromagnetic to paramagnetic dynamical phase transition in the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick (LMG) model, a collective XXZ model plus additional transverse and longitudinal fields, via Rabi spectroscopy. We experimentally reconstruct the boundary between the dynamical phases, which is in good agreement with mean-field theoretical predictions. Our work introduces new possibilities in quantum simulation of anisotropic spin-spin interactions and quantum metrology enhanced by many-body entanglement.
Entanglement entropy (EE), a fundamental conception in quantum information for characterizing entanglement, has been extensively employed to explore quantum phase transitions (QPTs). Although the conventional single-site mean-field (MF) approach successfully predicts the emergence of QPTs, it fails to include any entanglement. Here, for the first time, in the framework of a cluster MF treatment, we extract the signature of EE in the bosonic superfluid-insulator transitions. We consider a trimerized Kagome lattice of interacting bosons, in which each trimer is treated as a cluster, and implement the cluster MF treatment by decoupling all inter-trimer hopping. In addition to superfluid and integer insulator phases, we find that fractional insulator phases appear when the tunneling is dominated by the intra-trimer part. To quantify the residual bipartite entanglement in a cluster, we calculate the second-order Renyi entropy, which can be experimentally measured by quantum interference of many-body twins. The second-order Renyi entropy itself is continuous everywhere, however, the continuousness of its first-order derivative breaks down at the phase boundary. This means that the bosonic superfluid-insulator transitions can still be efficiently captured by the residual entanglement in our cluster MF treatment. Besides to the bosonic superfluid-insulator transitions, our cluster MF treatment may also be used to capture the signature of EE for other QPTs in quantum superlattice models.