Dynamical crystal creation with polar molecules or Rydberg atoms in optical lattices

We investigate the dynamical formation of crystalline states with systems of polar molecules or Rydberg atoms loaded into a deep optical lattice. External fields in these systems can be used to couple the atoms or molecules between two internal states: one that is weakly interacting and one that exhibits a strong dipole-dipole interaction. By appropriate time variation of the external fields we show that it is possible to produce crystalline states of the strongly interacting states with high filling fractions chosen via the parameters of the coupling.We study the coherent dynamics of this process in one dimension (1D) using a modified form of the time-evolving block decimation (TEBD) algorithm, and obtain crystalline states for system sizes and parameters corresponding to realistic experimental configurations. For polar molecules these crystalline states will be long-lived, assisting in a characterization of the state via the measurement of correlation functions. We also show that as the coupling strength increases in the model, the crystalline order is broken. This is characterized in 1D by a change in density-density correlation functions, which decay to a constant in the crystalline regime, but show different regions of exponential and algebraic decay for larger coupling strengths

Measuring entanglement growth in quench dynamics of bosons in an optical lattice

We discuss a scheme to measure the many-body entanglement growth during quench dynamics with bosonic atoms in optical lattices. By making use of a 1D or 2D setup in which two copies of the same state are prepared, we show how arbitrary order Renyi entropies can be extracted using tunnel-coupling between the copies and measurement of the parity of on-site occupation numbers, as has been performed in recent experiments. We illustrate these ideas for a Superfluid-Mott insulator quench in the Bose-Hubbard model, and also for hard-core bosons, and show that the scheme is robust against imperfections in the measurements.Comment: 4+ pages plus supplementary materia

Thermalization of strongly interacting bosons after spontaneous emissions in optical lattices

We study the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of bosonic atoms in a 1D optical lattice, after the ground-state is excited by a single spontaneous emission event, i.e. after an absorption and re-emission of a lattice photon. This is an important fundamental source of decoherence for current experiments, and understanding the resulting dynamics and changes in the many-body state is important for controlling heating in quantum simulators. Previously it was found that in the superfluid regime, simple observables relax to values that can be described by a thermal distribution on experimental time-scales, and that this breaks down for strong interactions (in the Mott insulator regime). Here we expand on this result, investigating the relaxation of the momentum distribution as a function of time, and discussing the relationship to eigenstate thermalization. For the strongly interacting limit, we provide an analytical analysis for the behavior of the system, based on an effective low-energy Hamiltonian in which the dynamics can be understood based on correlated doublon-holon pairs.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Light scattering and dissipative dynamics of many fermionic atoms in an optical lattice

We investigate the many-body dissipative dynamics of fermionic atoms in an optical lattice in the presence of incoherent light scattering. Deriving and solving a master equation to describe this process microscopically for many particles, we observe contrasting behaviour in terms of the robustness against this type of heating for different many-body states. In particular, we find that the magnetic correlations exhibited by a two-component gas in the Mott insulating phase should be particularly robust against decoherence from light scattering, because the decoherence in the lowest band is suppressed by a larger factor than the timescales for effective superexchange interactions that drive coherent dynamics. Furthermore, the derived formalism naturally generalizes to analogous states with SU(N) symmetry. In contrast, for typical atomic and laser parameters, two-particle correlation functions describing bound dimers for strong attractive interactions exhibit superradiant effects due to the indistinguishability of off-resonant photons scattered by atoms in different internal states. This leads to rapid decay of correlations describing off-diagonal long-range order for these states. Our predictions should be directly measurable in ongoing experiments, providing a basis for characterising and controlling heating processes in quantum simulation with fermions.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figure

Entanglement growth in quench dynamics with variable range interactions

Studying entanglement growth in quantum dynamics provides both insight into the underlying microscopic processes and information about the complexity of the quantum states, which is related to the efficiency of simulations on classical computers. Recently, experiments with trapped ions, polar molecules, and Rydberg excitations have provided new opportunities to observe dynamics with long-range interactions. We explore nonequilibrium coherent dynamics after a quantum quench in such systems, identifying qualitatively different behavior as the exponent of algebraically decaying spin-spin interactions in a transverse Ising chain is varied. Computing the build-up of bipartite entanglement as well as mutual information between distant spins, we identify linear growth of entanglement entropy corresponding to propagation of quasiparticles for shorter range interactions, with the maximum rate of growth occurring when the Hamiltonian parameters match those for the quantum phase transition. Counter-intuitively, the growth of bipartite entanglement for long-range interactions is only logarithmic for most regimes, i.e., substantially slower than for shorter range interactions. Experiments with trapped ions allow for the realization of this system with a tunable interaction range, and we show that the different phenomena are robust for finite system sizes and in the presence of noise. These results can act as a direct guide for the generation of large-scale entanglement in such experiments, towards a regime where the entanglement growth can render existing classical simulations inefficient.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure

Dressed, noise- or disorder- resilient optical lattices

External noise is inherent in any quantum system, and can have especially strong effects for systems exhibiting sensitive many-body phenomena. We show how a dressed lattice scheme can provide control over certain types of noise for atomic quantum gases in the lowest band of an optical lattice, removing the effects of lattice amplitude noise to first order for particular choices of the dressing field parameters. We investigate the non-equilibrium many-body dynamics for bosons and fermions induced by noise away from this parameter regime, and also show how the same technique can be used to reduce spatial disorder in projected lattice potentials.Comment: 4+ Pages, 4 Figure

Time-dependent currents of 1D bosons in an optical lattice

We analyse the time-dependence of currents in a 1D Bose gas in an optical lattice. For a 1D system, the stability of currents induced by accelerating the lattice exhibits a broad crossover as a function of the magnitude of the acceleration, and the strength of the inter-particle interactions. This differs markedly from mean-field results in higher dimensions. Using the infinite Time Evolving Block Decimation algorithm, we characterise this crossover by making quantitative predictions for the time-dependent behaviour of the currents and their decay rate. We also compute the time-dependence of quasi-condensate fractions which can be measured directly in experiments. We compare our results to calculations based on phase-slip methods, finding agreement with the scaling as the particle density increases, but with significant deviations near unit filling.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure

Conductivity in organic semiconductors hybridized with the vacuum field

Organic semiconductors have generated considerable interest for their potential for creating inexpensive and flexible devices easily processed on a large scale [1-11]. However technological applications are currently limited by the low mobility of the charge carriers associated with the disorder in these materials [5-8]. Much effort over the past decades has therefore been focused on optimizing the organisation of the material or the devices to improve carrier mobility. Here we take a radically different path to solving this problem, namely by injecting carriers into states that are hybridized to the vacuum electromagnetic field. These are coherent states that can extend over as many as 10^5 molecules and should thereby favour conductivity in such materials. To test this idea, organic semiconductors were strongly coupled to the vacuum electromagnetic field on plasmonic structures to form polaritonic states with large Rabi splittings ca. 0.7 eV. Conductivity experiments show that indeed the current does increase by an order of magnitude at resonance in the coupled state, reflecting mostly a change in field-effect mobility as revealed when the structure is gated in a transistor configuration. A theoretical quantum model is presented that confirms the delocalization of the wave-functions of the hybridized states and the consequences on the conductivity. While this is a proof-of-principle study, in practice conductivity mediated by light-matter hybridized states is easy to implement and we therefore expect that it will be used to improve organic devices. More broadly our findings illustrate the potential of engineering the vacuum electromagnetic environment to modify and to improve properties of materials.Comment: 16 pages, 13 figure