We report on measurements of resonantly enhanced tunneling of Bose-Einstein condensates loaded into an optical lattice. By controlling the initial conditions of our system we were able to observe resonant tunneling in the ground and the first two excited states of the lattice wells. We also investigated the effect of the intrinsic nonlinearity of the condensate on the tunneling resonances.
A new type of matter wave diffraction management is presented that leads to sub-diffractive soliton-like structures. The proposed management technique uses two counter-moving, identical periodic potentials (e.g. optical lattices). For suitable lattic
e parameters a novel type of atomic band-gap structure appears in which the effective atomic mass becomes infinite at the lowest edge of an energy band. This way normal matter-wave diffraction (proportional to the square of the atomic momentum) is replaced by fourth-order diffraction, and hence the evolution of the system becomes sub-diffractive.
Bose-Einstein condensates of $^{87}$Rb atoms are transferred into radio-frequency (RF) induced adiabatic potentials and the properties of the corresponding dressed states are explored. We report on measurements of the spin composition of dressed cond
ensates. We also show that adiabatic potentials can be used to trap atom gases in novel geometries, including suspending a cigar-shaped cloud above a curved sheet of atoms.
In this article, we present theoretical as well as experimental results on resonantly enhanced tunneling of Bose-Einstein condensates in optical lattices both in the linear case and for small nonlinearities. Our results demonstrate the usefulness of
condensates in optical lattices for simulating Hamiltonians originally used for describing solid state phenomena.
We report on the experimental investigation of the response of a three-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in the presence of a one-dimensional (1D) optical lattice. By means of Bragg spectroscopy we probe the band structure of the excitation
spectrum in the presence of the periodic potential. We selectively induce elementary excitations of the BEC choosing the transferred momentum and we observe different resonances in the energy transfer, corresponding to the transitions to different bands. The frequency, the width and the strength of these resonances are investigated as a function of the amplitude of the 1D optical lattice.
Shaking optical lattices in a resonant manner offers an efficient and versatile method to devise artificial gauge fields and topological band structures for ultracold atomic gases. This was recently demonstrated through the experimental realization o
f the Harper-Hofstadter model, which combined optical superlattices and resonant time-modulations. Adding inter-particle interactions to these engineered band systems is expected to lead to strongly-correlated states with topological features, such as fractional Chern insulators. However, the interplay between interactions and external time-periodic drives typically triggers violent instabilities and uncontrollable heating, hence potentially ruling out the possibility of accessing such intriguing states of matter in experiments. In this work, we study the early-stage parametric instabilities that occur in systems of resonantly-driven Bose-Einstein condensates in optical lattices. We apply and extend an approach based on Bogoliubov theory [PRX 7, 021015 (2017)] to a variety of resonantly-driven band models, from a simple shaken Wannier-Stark ladder to the more intriguing driven-induced Harper-Hofstadter model. In particular, we provide ab initio numerical and analytical predictions for the stability properties of these topical models. This work sheds light on general features that could guide current experiments to stable regimes of operation.