Nonequilibrium dynamics of bosonic atoms in optical lattices: Decoherence of many-body states due to spontaneous emission

By Hannes Pichler, Andrew J. Daley, Peter Zoller. 2010

147 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We analyze in detail the heating of bosonic atoms in an optical lattice due to incoherent scattering of light from the lasers forming the lattice. Because atoms scattered into higher bands do not thermalize on the time scale of typical experiments, this process cannot be described by the total energy increase in the system alone (which is determined by single-particle effects). The heating instead involves an important interplay between the atomic physics of the heating process and the many-body physics of the state. We characterize the effects on many-body states for various system parameters, where we observe important differences in the heating for strongly and weakly interacting regimes, as well as a strong dependence on the sign of the laser detuning from the excited atomic state. We compute heating rates and changes to characteristic correlation functions based on both perturbation-theory calculations and a time-dependent calculation of the dissipative many-body dynamics. The latter is made possible for one-dimensional systems by combining time-dependent density-matrix-renormalization-group methods with quantum trajectory techniques.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Spectroscopy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8a854b2b8d0d283ab5ea803ee97dcedeedb589d0

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Quantum trajectories and open many-body quantum systems (2014, methodology): “, [81], where this method was used to study transfer of particles to higher bands of an optical lattice in spontaneous emission events).”
Keldysh field theory for driven open quantum systems (2015, background): “It causes dephasing and leads to a linear increase of the energy in the system, 〈H〉t ∝ Jγet [166, 167].”
Cooling in strongly correlated optical lattices: prospects and challenges (2010, methodology): “Since energetic considerations and 1D simulations [127] imply the atoms in higher bands do not decay to the ground band and thermalize on experimental timescales, [126, 127] focus on scattering events that do not result in an inter-band transition.”
Engineered Open Systems and Quantum Simulations with Atoms and Ions (2012, background): “There, a bath typically couples to the atomic density with jump operators ni = a † i ai, as in the case of decoherence due to spontaneous emission in an optical lattice (Pichler et al., 2010), or for collisional interactions.”