Interactions are known to have dramatic effects on bosonic gases in one dimension (1D). Not only does the ground state transform from a condensate-like state to an effective Fermi sea, but new fundamental excitations, which do not have any higher-dim
ensional equivalents, are predicted to appear. In this work, we trace these elusive excitations via their effects on the dynamical structure factor of 1D strongly-interacting Bose gases at low temperature. An array of 1D Bose gases is obtained by loading a $^{87}$Rb condensate in a 2D lattice potential. The dynamical structure factor of the system is probed by energy deposition through low-momentum Bragg excitations. The experimental signals are compared to recent theoretical predictions for the dynamical structure factor of the Lieb-Liniger model at $T > 0$. Our results demonstrate that the main contribution to the spectral widths stems from the dynamics of the interaction-induced excitations in the gas, which cannot be described by the Luttinger liquid theory.
We investigate experimentally and theoretically the dynamical properties of a Mott insulator in decoupled one-dimensional chains. Using a theoretical analysis of the Bragg excitation scheme we show that the spectrum of inter-band transitions holds in
formation on the single-particle Greens function of the insulator. In particular the existence of particle-hole coherence due to quantum fluctuations in the Mott state is clearly seen in the Bragg spectra and quantified. Finally we propose a scheme to directly measure the full, momentum resolved spectral function as obtained in angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy of solids.
We investigate the coherence properties of an array of one-dimensional Bose gases with short-scale phase fluctuations. The momentum distribution is measured using Bragg spectroscopy and an effective coherence length of the whole ensemble is defined.
In addition, we propose and demonstrate that time-of-flight absorption imaging can be used as a simple probe to directly measure the coherence-length of 1D gases in the regime where phase-fluctuations are strong. This method is suitable for future studies such as investigating the effect of disorder on the phase coherence.
