Mott insulators in strong electric fields

By S. Sachdev, Krishnendu Sengupta, S. Girvin. 2002

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent experiments on ultracold atomic gases in an optical lattice potential have produced a Mott insulating state of ${}^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ atoms. This state is stable to a small applied potential gradient (an ``electric'' field), but a resonant response was observed when the potential energy drop per lattice spacing $(E),$ was close to the repulsive interaction energy (U) between two atoms in the same lattice potential well. We identify all states which are resonantly coupled to the Mott insulator for $E\ensuremath{\approx}U$ via an infinitesimal tunneling amplitude between neighboring potential wells. The strong correlation between these states is described by an effective Hamiltonian for the resonant subspace. This Hamiltonian exhibits quantum phase transitions associated with an Ising density wave order and with the appearance of superfluidity in the directions transverse to the electric field. We suggest that the observed resonant response is related to these transitions and propose experiments to directly detect the order parameters. The generalizations to electric fields applied in different directions and to a variety of lattices should allow study of numerous other correlated quantum phases.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/891c79e7afeb1cbf314cb378df2d0e164c16375a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Prediction of Toric Code Topological Order from Rydberg Blockade (2020, background): “For a fixed blockade radius, the PXP model [63], which depends on a single parameter δ/Ω, has been explored in great detail in one dimension—both theoretically and experimentally— where it led to a rich phenomenology including quantum scars [64–72] and lattice gauge theories [73].”
Observation of many-body scarring in a Bose-Hubbard quantum simulator (2022, methodology): “In order to realize the PXP model in the Bose-Hubbard quantum simulator, we tune the parameters to the resonant regime U ≈ J [36,37], which has been studied extensively in the context of quantum Ising chains [38–40].”
Localization from Hilbert space shattering: From theory to physical realizations (2020, methodology): “[46] Subir Sachdev, K.”
Signatures of integrability in the dynamics of Rydberg-blockaded chains (2018, background): “[33] Subir Sachdev, K.”
Probing many-body dynamics on a 51-atom quantum simulator (2017, background): “Consistent with predictions from finite-size scaling analysis [30, 31], this peak is shifted towards positive values of ∆/Ω.”