No Arabic abstract
Open many-body quantum systems have attracted renewed interest in the context of quantum information science and quantum transport with biological clusters and ultracold atomic gases. The physical relevance in many-particle bosonic systems lies in the realization of counter-intuitive transport phenomena and the stochastic preparation of highly stable and entangled many-body states due to engineered dissipation. We review a variety of approaches to describe an open system of interacting ultracold bosons which can be modeled by a tight-binding Hubbard approximation. Going along with the presentation of theoretical and numerical techniques, we present a series of results in diverse setups, based on a master equation description of the dissipative dynamics of ultracold bosons in a one-dimensional lattice. Next to by now standard numerical methods such as the exact unravelling of the master equation by quantum jumps for small systems and beyond mean-field expansions for larger ones, we present a coherent-state path integral formalism based on Feynman-Vernon theory applied to a many-body context.
Open many-body quantum systems have recently gained renewed interest in the context of quantum information science and quantum transport with biological clusters and ultracold atomic gases. A series of results in diverse setups is presented, based on a Master equation approach to describe the dissipative dynamics of ultracold bosons in a one-dimensional lattice. The creation of mesoscopic stable many-body structures in the lattice is predicted and the non-equilibrium transport of neutral atoms in the regime of strong and weak interactions is studied.
Ever since the first observation of Bose-Einstein condensation in the nineties, ultracold quantum gases have been the subject of intense research, providing a unique tool to understand the behavior of matter governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. Ultracold bosonic atoms loaded in an optical lattice are usually described by the Bose-Hubbard model or a variant of it. In addition to the common insulating and superfluid phases, other phases (like density waves and supersolids) may show up in the presence of a short-range interparticle repulsion and also depending on the geometry of the lattice. We herein explore this possibility, using the graph of a convex polyhedron as lattice and playing with the coordination of nodes to promote the wanted finite-size ordering. To accomplish the job we employ the method of decoupling approximation, whose efficacy is tested in one case against exact diagonalization. We report zero-temperature results for two Catalan solids, the tetrakis hexahedron and the pentakis dodecahedron, for which a thorough ground-state analysis reveals the existence of insulating phases with polyhedral order and a widely extended supersolid region. The key to this outcome is the unbalance in coordination between inequivalent nodes of the graph. The predicted phases can be probed in systems of ultracold atoms using programmable holographic optical tweezers.
The manipulation of many-body systems often involves time-dependent forces that cause unwanted heating. One strategy to suppress heating is to use time-periodic (Floquet) forces at large driving frequencies. For quantum spin systems with bounded spectra, it was shown rigorously that the heating rate is exponentially small in the driving frequency. Recently, the exponential suppression of heating has also been observed in an experiment with ultracold atoms, realizing a periodically driven Bose-Hubbard model. This model has an unbounded spectrum and, hence, is beyond the reach of previous theoretical approaches. Here, we study this model with two semiclassical approaches valid, respectively, at large and weak interaction strengths. In both limits, we compute the heating rates by studying the statistical probability to encounter a many-body resonance, and obtain a quantitative agreement with the exact diagonalization of the quantum model. Our approach demonstrates the relevance of statistical arguments to Floquet perthermalization of interacting many-body quantum systems.
The Fermi-Hubbard model is one of the key models of condensed matter physics, which holds a potential for explaining the mystery of high-temperature superconductivity. Recent progress in ultracold atoms in optical lattices has paved the way to studying the models phase diagram using the tools of quantum simulation, which emerged as a promising alternative to the numerical calculations plagued by the infamous sign problem. However, the temperatures achieved using elaborate laser cooling protocols so far have been too high to show the appearance of antiferromagnetic and superconducting quantum phases directly. In this work, we demonstrate that using the machinery of dissipative quantum state engineering, one can efficiently prepare antiferromagnetic order in present-day experiments with ultracold fermions. The core of the approach is to add incoherent laser scattering in such a way that the antiferromagnetic state emerges as the dark state of the driven-dissipative dynamics. In order to elucidate the development of the antiferromagnetic order we employ two complementary techniques: Monte Carlo wave function simulations for small systems and a recently proposed variational method for open quantum systems, operating in the thermodynamic limit. The controlled dissipation channels described in this work are straightforward to add to already existing experimental setups.
We study the ground-state properties of ultracold bosons in an optical lattice in the regime of strong interactions. The system is described by a non-standard Bose-Hubbard model with both occupation-dependent tunneling and on-site interaction. We find that for sufficiently strong coupling the system features a phase-transition from a Mott insulator with one particle per site to a superfluid of spatially extended particle pairs living on top of the Mott background -- instead of the usual transition to a superfluid of single particles/holes. Increasing the interaction further, a superfluid of particle pairs localized on a single site (rather than being extended) on top of the Mott background appears. This happens at the same interaction strength where the Mott-insulator phase with 2 particles per site is destroyed completely by particle-hole fluctuations for arbitrarily small tunneling. In another regime, characterized by weak interaction, but high occupation numbers, we observe a dynamical instability in the superfluid excitation spectrum. The new ground state is a superfluid, forming a 2D slab, localized along one spatial direction that is spontaneously chosen.