167 research outputs found
Periodically-driven quantum matter: the case of resonant modulations
Quantum systems can show qualitatively new forms of behavior when they are
driven by fast time-periodic modulations. In the limit of large driving
frequency, the long-time dynamics of such systems can often be described by a
time-independent effective Hamiltonian, which is generally identified through a
perturbative treatment. Here, we present a general formalism that describes
time-modulated physical systems, in which the driving frequency is large, but
resonant with respect to energy spacings inherent to the system at rest. Such a
situation is currently exploited in optical-lattice setups, where superlattice
(or Wannier-Stark-ladder) potentials are resonantly modulated so as to control
the tunneling matrix elements between lattice sites, offering a powerful method
to generate artificial fluxes for cold-atom systems. The formalism developed in
this work identifies the basic ingredients needed to generate interesting flux
patterns and band structures using resonant modulations. Additionally, our
approach allows for a simple description of the micro-motion underlying the
dynamics; we illustrate its characteristics based on diverse dynamic-lattice
configurations. It is shown that the impact of the micro-motion on physical
observables strongly depends on the implemented scheme, suggesting that a
theoretical description in terms of the effective Hamiltonian alone is
generally not sufficient to capture the full time-evolution of the system.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures; includes a new Section III dedicated to the
strong-driving regim
Observation of the Meissner effect with ultracold atoms in bosonic ladders
We report on the observation of the Meissner effect in bosonic flux ladders
of ultracold atoms. Using artificial gauge fields induced by laser-assisted
tunneling, we realize arrays of decoupled ladder systems that are exposed to a
uniform magnetic field. By suddenly decoupling the ladders and projecting into
isolated double wells, we are able to measure the currents on each side of the
ladder. For large coupling strengths along the rungs of the ladder, we find a
saturated maximum chiral current corresponding to a full screening of the
artificial magnetic field. For lower coupling strengths, the chiral current
decreases in good agreement with expectations of a vortex lattice phase. Our
work marks the first realization of a low-dimensional Meissner effect and,
furthermore, it opens the path to exploring interacting particles in low
dimensions exposed to a uniform magnetic field
Experimental realization of plaquette resonating valence bond states with ultracold atoms in optical superlattices
The concept of valence bond resonance plays a fundamental role in the theory
of the chemical bond and is believed to lie at the heart of many-body quantum
physical phenomena. Here we show direct experimental evidence of a
time-resolved valence bond quantum resonance with ultracold bosonic atoms in an
optical lattice. By means of a superlattice structure we create a
three-dimensional array of independent four-site plaquettes, which we can fully
control and manipulate in parallel. Moreover, we show how small-scale plaquette
resonating valence bond states with s- and d-wave symmetry can be created and
characterized. We anticipate our findings to open the path towards the creation
and analysis of many-body RVB states in ultracold atomic gases.Comment: 7 page, 4 figures in main text, 3 figures in appendi
Topological charge pumping in the interacting bosonic Rice-Mele model
We investigate topological charge pumping in a system of interacting bosons in the tight-binding limit, described by the Rice-Mele model. An appropriate topological invarient for the many-body case is the change of polarization per pump cycle, which we compute for various interaction strengths from infinite-size matrix-product-state simulations. We verify that the charge pumping remains quantized as long as the pump cycle avoids the superfluid phase. In the limit of hardcore bosons, the quantized pumped charge can be understood from single-particle properties such as the integrated Berry curvature constructed from Bloch stated, while this picture breaks down at finite interaction strengths. These two properties-robust quantized charge transport in an interacting system of bosons and breakdown of a single-particle invarient-could both be measured with ultracold quantum gases extending a previous experiment [Lohse et al., Nat. Phys. 12, 350 (2016)]. Furthermore, we investigate the entanglement spectrum of the Rice-Mele modal and argue that the quantized charge pumping is encoded in a winding of the spectral flow in the entanglement over a pump cycle
Realization of the Hofstadter Hamiltonian with Ultracold Atoms in Optical Lattices
We demonstrate the experimental implementation of an optical lattice that
allows for the generation of large homogeneous and tunable artificial magnetic
fields with ultracold atoms. Using laser-assisted tunneling in a tilted optical
potential we engineer spatially dependent complex tunneling amplitudes. Thereby
atoms hopping in the lattice accumulate a phase shift equivalent to the
Aharonov-Bohm phase of charged particles in a magnetic field. We determine the
local distribution of fluxes through the observation of cyclotron orbits of the
atoms on lattice plaquettes, showing that the system is described by the
Hofstadter model. Furthermore, we show that for two atomic spin states with
opposite magnetic moments, our system naturally realizes the time-reversal
symmetric Hamiltonian underlying the quantum spin Hall effect, i.e., two
different spin components experience opposite directions of the magnetic field
Benchmarking a Novel Efficient Numerical Method for Localized 1D Fermi-Hubbard Systems on a Quantum Simulator
Quantum simulators have made a remarkable progress towards exploring the
dynamics of many-body systems, many of which offer a formidable challenge to
both theoretical and numerical methods. While state-of-the-art quantum
simulators are in principle able to simulate quantum dynamics well outside the
domain of classical computers, they are noisy and limited in the variability of
the initial state of the dynamics and the observables that can be measured.
Despite these limitations, here we show that such a quantum simulator can be
used to in-effect solve for the dynamics of a many-body system. We develop an
efficient numerical technique that facilitates classical simulations in regimes
not accessible to exact calculations or other established numerical techniques.
The method is based on approximations that are well suited to describe
localized one-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard systems. Since this new method does not
have an error estimate and the approximations do not hold in general, we use a
neutral-atom Fermi-Hubbard quantum simulator with
lattice sites to benchmark its performance in terms of accuracy and convergence
for evolution times up to tunnelling times. We then use these
approximations in order to derive a simple prediction of the behaviour of
interacting Bloch oscillations for spin-imbalanced Fermi-Hubbard systems, which
we show to be in quantitative agreement with experimental results. Finally, we
demonstrate that the convergence of our method is the slowest when the
entanglement depth developed in the many-body system we consider is neither too
small nor too large. This represents a promising regime for near-term
applications of quantum simulators.Comment: 24 pages, 10 figure
Observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation in a Strong Synthetic Magnetic Field
Extensions of Berry's phase and the quantum Hall effect have led to the
discovery of new states of matter with topological properties. Traditionally,
this has been achieved using gauge fields created by magnetic fields or spin
orbit interactions which couple only to charged particles. For neutral
ultracold atoms, synthetic magnetic fields have been created which are strong
enough to realize the Harper-Hofstadter model. Despite many proposals and major
experimental efforts, so far it has not been possible to prepare the ground
state of this system. Here we report the observation of Bose-Einstein
condensation for the Harper-Hofstadter Hamiltonian with one-half flux quantum
per lattice unit cell. The diffraction pattern of the superfluid state directly
shows the momentum distribution on the wavefuction, which is gauge-dependent.
It reveals both the reduced symmetry of the vector potential and the twofold
degeneracy of the ground state. We explore an adiabatic many-body state
preparation protocol via the Mott insulating phase and observe the superfluid
ground state in a three-dimensional lattice with strong interactions.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures. Supplement: 6 pages, 4 figure
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