Probing the Superfluid–to–Mott Insulator Transition at the Single-Atom Level

By Eric Tai, W. Bakr, R. Ma, Jonathan Simon, A. Peng, J. Gillen, Simon Foelling, L. Pollet, P. Preiss, M. Greiner. Science, 2010

652 citations recorded by the source corpus.

From Superfluid to Mott Insulator One of the most attractive characteristics of cold atomic gases in optical lattices is their ability to simulate condensed-matter systems. The results of these quantum simulations are usually averaged over the atomic ensemble, or course-grained over several lattice sites. Now, Bakr et al. (p. 547, published online 17 June; see the Perspective by DeMarco) provide a single lattice site view onto the transition of a Bose gas of Rb-87 from the superfluid to the Mott-insulating state. Characteristic concentric shells of uniform number density were observed deep in the Mott insulator regime, and probing the local quantum dynamics revealed unexpectedly short time scales. The low-defect Mott structures identified may provide a starting point for quantum magnetism experiments. Imaging of atoms that were optically trapped in lattice sites reveals local dynamics of a quantum phase transition. Quantum gases in optical lattices offer an opportunity to experimentally realize and explore condensed matter models in a clean, tunable system. We used single atom–single lattice site imaging to investigate the Bose-Hubbard model on a microscopic level. Our technique enables space- and time-resolved characterization of the number statistics across the superfluid–Mott insulator quantum phase transition. Site-resolved probing of fluctuations provides us with a sensitive local thermometer, allows us to identify microscopic heterostructures of low-entropy Mott domains, and enables us to measure local quantum dynamics, revealing surprisingly fast transition time scales. Our results may serve as a benchmark for theoretical studies of quantum dynamics, and may guide the engineering of low-entropy phases in a lattice.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c0e8521db84f8cf380ef4414324e2e2f06a0040

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Citations in the corpus

Floquet topological transitions in a driven one-dimensional topological insulator (2015, methodology): “Furthermore, with the help of the newly developed high-resolution detection and manipulation techniques [67,68], one could detect the presence of edge states in ﬁnite-size systems.”
Measuring entanglement entropy in a quantum many-body system (2015, methodology): “To initialize two independent and identical copies of a state with fixed particle number N , we start with a low entropy 2D Mott insulator with unity filling in the atomic limit [34] and deterministically retain a plaquette of 2×N atoms while 50/50 BS”
Exponential Improvement in Photon Storage Fidelities Using Subradiance and “Selective Radiance” in Atomic Arrays (2017, background): “In such systems, both bosonic [105] and fermionic [106] Mott insulator phases – where the number of atoms per site can be limited to one – have been realized.”
Observation of chiral currents with ultracold atoms in bosonic ladders (2014, background): “In future works it would be intriguing to use the recently developed high resolution imaging [27, 28] to measure the lattice currents in a spatially resolved way.”
Comparing and contrasting nuclei and cold atomic gases (2013, background): “Furthermore, it is now possible to address single lattice sites in an optical lattice and produce and probe only a few atoms on such a site (Bakr et al. 2010, Sherson et al. 2010, Weitenberg et al. 2011).”
Simulating chemistry using quantum computers. (2010, background): “For example, quantum gases in optical lattices can be used to simulate superfluidity (12).”