Quantum phase transition from a superfluid to a Mott insulator in a gas of ultracold atoms

By M. Greiner, O. Mandel, Tilman Esslinger, T. Hänsch, I. Bloch. Nature, 2002

4,197 citations recorded by the source corpus.

For a system at a temperature of absolute zero, all thermal fluctuations are frozen out, while quantum fluctuations prevail. These microscopic quantum fluctuations can induce a macroscopic phase transition in the ground state of a many-body system when the relative strength of two competing energy terms is varied across a critical value. Here we observe such a quantum phase transition in a Bose–Einstein condensate with repulsive interactions, held in a three-dimensional optical lattice potential. As the potential depth of the lattice is increased, a transition is observed from a superfluid to a Mott insulator phase. In the superfluid phase, each atom is spread out over the entire lattice, with long-range phase coherence. But in the insulating phase, exact numbers of atoms are localized at individual lattice sites, with no phase coherence across the lattice; this phase is characterized by a gap in the excitation spectrum. We can induce reversible changes between the two ground states of the system.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/137eac04b693a392205fffc5d26b79e212de4da1

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Colloquium: Trapping and manipulating photon states in atomic ensembles (2003, background): “Some very recent fascinating experiments have made definitive steps toward achieving a required degree of quantum control (Schlosser et al., 2001; Orzel et al., 2001; Greiner et al., 2002).”
Ultracold quantum gases in triangular optical lattices (2009, background): “The SF-MI transition of ultracold atoms confined in an optical lattice has been under vast investigation since first pioneering theoretical [38, 39] and experimental [40] studies over the last decade.”
Suppression of the critical temperature for superfluidity near the Mott transition (2009, positive): “So far, several of the characteristic ground state properties of the systems either in the SF or in the MI have been measured [4, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19].”
Bose–Einstein condensation of atomic gases (2002, methodology): “This phase transition has been observed recently by researchers at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany (ref”
Simulating a quantum magnet with trapped ions (2008, background): “For large coupled spin systems, optical lattices might be advantageou”