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Experimental properties of Bose-Einstein condensates in 1D optical lattices: Bloch oscillations, Landau-Zener tunneling and mean-field effects
We report experimental results on the properties of Bose-Einstein condensates
in 1D optical lattices. By accelerating the lattice, we observed Bloch
oscillations of the condensate in the lowest band, as well as Landau-Zener
(L-Z) tunneling into higher bands when the lattice depth was reduced and/or the
acceleration of the lattice was increased. The dependence of the L-Z tunneling
rate on the condensate density was then related to mean-field effects modifying
the effective potential acting on the condensate, yielding good agreement with
recent theoretical work. We also present several methods for measuring the
lattice depth and discuss the effects of the micromotion in the TOP-trap on our
experimental results.Comment: 11 pages, 14 figure