Ultracold quantum gases in triangular optical lattices

By C. Becker, P. Soltan-Panahi, J. Kronjäger, S. Dörscher, Kai Bongs, Klaus Sengstock. 2009

207 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over recent years, exciting developments in the field of ultracold atoms confined in optical lattices have led to numerous theoretical proposals devoted to the quantum simulation of problems e.g. known from condensed matter physics. Many of those ideas demand experimental environments with non-cubic lattice geometries. In this paper, we report on the implementation of a versatile three-beam lattice allowing for the generation of triangular as well as hexagonal optical lattices. As an important step, the superfluid–Mott insulator (SF–MI) quantum phase transition has been observed and investigated in detail in this lattice geometry for the first time. In addition to this, we study the physics of spinor Bose–Einstein condensates (BEC) in the presence of the triangular optical lattice potential, especially spin changing dynamics across the SF–MI transition. Our results suggest that, below the SF–MI phase transition, a well-established mean-field model describes the observed data when renormalizing the spin-dependent interaction. Interestingly, this opens up new perspectives for a lattice-driven tuning of a spin dynamics resonance occurring through the interplay of the quadratic Zeeman effect and spin-dependent interaction. Finally, we discuss further lattice configurations that can be realized with our setup.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9aec2d9769f20d144821d3245c5ad701799a4bd0

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

In Condensed Matter Physics

Citations in the corpus

Topological characterizations of an extended Su–Schrieffer–Heeger model (2019, unknown): “[15] Becker, C.”
Quantum simulation of the Hubbard model with ultracold fermions in optical lattices (2018, unknown): “Depending on the exact geometrical arrangement of the laser beams, a broad range of lattice geometries is possible, from simple square or cubic lattices [33] to more complex dimerized, triangular, hexagonal, Kagome or Lieb geometries [34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41].”
Cooling in strongly correlated optical lattices: prospects and challenges (2010, background): “A bosonic MI has been realized in cubic [26], square [48–50], one-dimensional, hexagonal [52] and triangular [54] lattices.”
Multi-component quantum gases in spin-dependent hexagonal lattices (2010, background): “Furthermore, by changing only the polarization of the laser beams creating the lattice, a spin-independent triangular lattice can be realize”
Quantum Simulation (2013, background): “…(Bermudez et al., 2011; Ivanov and Schmidt-Kaler, 2011; Kim et al., 2010; Porras and Cirac, 2006b), NMR (Peng et al., 2009), photons (Ma et al., 2011) and atoms in optical lattices (see (Lewenstein et al., 2007) and references therein, (Becker et al., 2010; Liu et al., 2010; Struck et al., 2011)).”