141 research outputs found
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
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
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
Coupling ultracold matter to dynamical gauge fields in optical lattices: From flux attachment to ℤ2 lattice gauge theories
From the standard model of particle physics to strongly correlated electrons, various physical settings are formulated in terms of matter coupled to gauge fields. Quantum simulations based on ultracold atoms in optical lattices provide a promising avenue to study these complex systems and unravel the underlying many-body physics. Here, we demonstrate how quantized dynamical gauge fields can be created in mixtures of ultracold atoms in optical lattices, using a combination of coherent lattice modulation with strong interactions. Specifically, we propose implementation of ℤ2 lattice gauge theories coupled to matter, reminiscent of theories previously introduced in high-temperature superconductivity. We discuss a range of settings from zero-dimensional toy models to ladders featuring transitions in the gauge sector to extended two-dimensional systems. Mastering lattice gauge theories in optical lattices constitutes a new route toward the realization of strongly correlated systems, with properties dictated by an interplay of dynamical matter and gauge fields
Observing non-ergodicity due to kinetic constraints in tilted Fermi-Hubbard chains
The thermalization of isolated quantum many-body systems is deeply related to
fundamental questions of quantum information theory. While integrable or
many-body localized systems display non-ergodic behavior due to extensively
many conserved quantities, recent theoretical studies have identified a rich
variety of more exotic phenomena in between these two extreme limits. The
tilted one-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model, which is readily accessible in
experiments with ultracold atoms, emerged as an intriguing playground to study
non-ergodic behavior in a clean disorder-free system. While non-ergodic
behavior was established theoretically in certain limiting cases, there is no
complete understanding of the complex thermalization properties of this model.
In this work, we experimentally study the relaxation of an initial
charge-density wave and find a remarkably long-lived initial-state memory over
a wide range of parameters. Our observations are well reproduced by numerical
simulations of a clean system. Using analytical calculations we further provide
a detailed microscopic understanding of this behavior, which can be attributed
to emergent kinetic constraints.Comment: accepted in Nature Communication
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