23 research outputs found
Excitation spectrum of Mott shells in optical lattices
We theoretically study the excitation spectrum of confined macroscopic
optical lattices in the Mott-insulating limit. For large systems, a fast
numerical method is proposed to calculate the ground state filling and
excitation energies. We introduce many-particle on-site energies capturing
multi-band effects and discuss tunnelling on a perturbative level using an
effectively restricted Hilbert space. Results for small one-dimensional
lattices obtained by this method are in good agreement with the exact
multi-band diagonalization of the Hamiltonian. Spectral properties associated
with the formation of regions with constant filling, so-called Mott shells, are
investigated and interfaces between the shells with strong particle
fluctuations are characterized by gapless local excitations
Emulating Molecular Orbitals and Electronic Dynamics with Ultracold Atoms
In recent years, ultracold atoms in optical lattices have proven their great
value as quantum simulators for studying strongly correlated phases and complex
phenomena in solid-state systems. Here we reveal their potential as quantum
simulators for molecular physics and propose a technique to image the
three-dimensional molecular orbitals with high resolution. The outstanding
tunability of ultracold atoms in terms of potential and interaction offer fully
adjustable model systems for gaining deep insight into the electronic structure
of molecules. We study the orbitals of an artificial benzene molecule and
discuss the effect of tunable interactions in its conjugated pi electron system
with special regard to localization and spin order. The dynamical time scales
of ultracold atom simulators are on the order of milliseconds, which allows for
the time-resolved monitoring of a broad range of dynamical processes. As an
example, we compute the hole dynamics in the conjugated pi system of the
artificial benzene molecule.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure
Localization and delocalization of ultracold bosonic atoms in finite optical lattices
We study bosonic atoms in small optical lattices by exact diagonalization and
observe a striking similarity to the superfluid to Mott insulator transition in
macroscopic systems. The momentum distribution, the formation of an energy gap,
and the pair correlation function show only a weak size dependence. For
noncommensurate filling we reveal in deep lattices a mixture of localized and
delocalized particles, which is sensitive to lattice imperfections. Breaking
the lattice symmetry causes a Bose-glass-like behavior. We discuss the nature
of excited states and orbital effects by using an exact diagonalization
technique that includes higher bands.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures. Published versio
Self-Trapping of Bosons and Fermions in Optical Lattices
We theoretically investigate the enhanced localization of bosonic atoms by
fermionic atoms in three-dimensional optical lattices and find a self-trapping
of the bosons for attractive boson-fermion interaction. Because of this mutual
interaction, the fermion orbitals are substantially squeezed, which results in
a strong deformation of the effective potential for bosons. This effect is
enhanced by an increasing bosonic filling factor leading to a large shift of
the transition between the superfluid and the Mott-insulator phase. We find a
nonlinear dependency of the critical potential depth on the boson-fermion
interaction strength. The results, in general, demonstrate the important role
of higher Bloch bands for the physics of attractively interacting quantum gas
mixtures in optical lattices and are of direct relevance to recent experiments
with 87Rb - 40K mixtures, where a large shift of the critical point has been
found.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. Published versio