In the quest to reach lower temperatures of ultra-cold gases in optical lattice experiments, non-adiabaticites during lattice loading are one of the limiting factors that prevent the same low temperatures to be reached as in experiments without latti
ce. Simulating the loading of a bosonic quantum gas into a one-dimensional optical lattice with and without a trap, we find that the redistribution of atomic density inside a global confining potential is by far the dominant source of heating. Based on these results we propose to adjust the trapping potential during loading to minimize changes to the density distribution. Our simulations confirm that a very simple linear interpolation of the trapping potential during loading already significantly decreases the heating of a quantum gas and we discuss how loading protocols minimizing density redistributions can be designed.
The density-matrix renormalization group method has become a standard computational approach to the low-energy physics as well as dynamics of low-dimensional quantum systems. In this paper, we present a new set of applications, available as part of t
he ALPS package, that provide an efficient and flexible implementation of these methods based on a matrix-product state (MPS) representation. Our applications implement, within the same framework, algorithms to variationally find the ground state and low-lying excited states as well as simulate the time evolution of arbitrary one-dimensional and two-dimensional models. Implementing the conservation of quantum numbers for generic Abelian symmetries, we achieve performance competitive with the best codes in the community. Example results are provided for (i) a model of itinerant fermions in one dimension and (ii) a model of quantum magnetism.
