Atomic Scattering in Presence of an External Confinement and a Gas of Impenetrable Bosons

We calculate, within the pseudopotential approximation, a one-dimensional scattering amplitude and effective one-dimensional interaction potential for atoms confined transversally by an atom waveguide or highly elongated ``cigar''-shaped atomic trap. We show that in the low-energy scattering regime, the scattering process degenerates to a total reflection suggesting an experimental realization of a famous model in theoretical physics - a one-dimensional gas of impenetrable bosons (``Tonks'' gas). We give an estimate for suitable experimental parameters for alkali atoms confined in waveguides.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures; list of atoms - candidates for the Tonks gas realisation is restricted to the positive scatt. length; Cs is excluded from the list; some new references added; minor changes in the text; accepted in PRL June 22, 199

Relaxation in a Completely Integrable Many-Body Quantum System: An Ab Initio Study of the Dynamics of the Highly Excited States of Lattice Hard-Core Bosons

In this Letter we pose the question of whether a many-body quantum system with a full set of conserved quantities can relax to an equilibrium state, and, if it can, what the properties of such state are. We confirm the relaxation hypothesis through a thorough ab initio numerical investigation of the dynamics of hard-core bosons on a one-dimensional lattice. Further, a natural extension of the Gibbs ensemble to integrable systems results in a theory that is able to predict the mean values of physical observables after relaxation. Finally, we show that our generalized equilibrium carries more memory of the initial conditions than the usual thermodynamic one. This effect may have many experimental consequences, some of which having already been observed in the recent experiment on the non-equilibrium dynamics of one-dimensional hard-core bosons in a harmonic potential [T. Kinoshita, T. Wenger, D. S. Weiss, Nature (London) 440, 900 (2006)].Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, published versio