38 research outputs found
Floquet engineering of correlated tunneling in the Bose-Hubbard model with ultracold atoms
We report on the experimental implementation of tunable occupation-dependent
tunneling in a Bose-Hubbard system of ultracold atoms via time-periodic
modulation of the on-site interaction energy. The tunneling rate is inferred
from a time-resolved measurement of the lattice site occupation after a quantum
quench. We demonstrate coherent control of the tunneling dynamics in the
correlated many-body system, including full suppression of tunneling as
predicted within the framework of Floquet theory. We find that the tunneling
rate explicitly depends on the atom number difference in neighboring lattice
sites. Our results may open up ways to realize artificial gauge fields that
feature density dependence with ultracold atoms.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figure
Inducing Transport in a Dissipation-Free Lattice with Super Bloch Oscillations
Particles in a perfect lattice potential perform Bloch oscillations when
subject to a constant force, leading to localization and preventing
conductivity. For a weakly-interacting Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of Cs
atoms, we observe giant center-of-mass oscillations in position space with a
displacement across hundreds of lattice sites when we add a periodic modulation
to the force near the Bloch frequency. We study the dependence of these "super"
Bloch oscillations on lattice depth, modulation amplitude, and modulation
frequency and show that they provide a means to induce linear transport in a
dissipation-free lattice. Surprisingly, we find that, for an interacting
quantum system, super Bloch oscillations strongly suppress the appearance of
dynamical instabilities and, for our parameters, increase the phase-coherence
time by more than a factor of hundred.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure
Observation of many-body long-range tunneling after a quantum quench
Quantum tunneling constitutes one of the most fundamental processes in
nature. We observe resonantly-enhanced long-range quantum tunneling in
one-dimensional Mott-insulating Hubbard chains that are suddenly quenched into
a tilted configuration. Higher-order many-body tunneling processes occur over
up to five lattice sites when the tilt per site is tuned to integer fractions
of the Mott gap. Starting from a one-atom-per-site Mott state the response of
the many-body quantum system is observed as resonances in the number of doubly
occupied sites and in the emerging coherence in momentum space. Second- and
third-order tunneling shows up in the transient response after the tilt, from
which we extract the characteristic scaling in accordance with perturbation
theory and numerical simulations.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figure
Preparation and spectroscopy of a metastable Mott insulator state with attractive interactions
We prepare and study a metastable attractive Mott insulator state formed with
bosonic atoms in a three-dimensional optical lattice. Starting from a Mott
insulator with Cs atoms at weak repulsive interactions, we use a magnetic
Feshbach resonance to tune the interactions to large attractive values and
produce a metastable state pinned by attractive interactions with a lifetime on
the order of 10 seconds. We probe the (de-)excitation spectrum via lattice
modulation spectroscopy, measuring the interaction dependence of two- and
three-body bound state energies. As a result of increased on-site three-body
loss we observe resonance broadening and suppression of tunneling processes
that produce three-body occupation.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure