Dynamical control of matter-wave tunneling in periodic potentials

Abstract

We report on measurements of dynamical suppression of inter-well tunneling of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in a strongly driven optical lattice. The strong driving is a sinusoidal shaking of the lattice corresponding to a time-varying linear potential, and the tunneling is measured by letting the BEC freely expand in the lattice. The measured tunneling rate is reduced and, for certain values of the shaking parameter, completely suppressed. Our results are in excellent agreement with theoretical predictions. Furthermore, we have verified that in general the strong shaking does not destroy the phase coherence of the BEC, opening up the possibility of realizing quantum phase transitions by using the shaking strength as the control parameter.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Visualization of Coherent Destruction of Tunneling in an Optical Double Well System
• Quantum control and entanglement using periodic driving fields
• Tuning the Mott transition in a Bose-Einstein condensate by multi-photon absorption
• Extended Coherence Time with Atom-Number Squeezed Sources

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Coherent control of dressed matter waves
• Single Particle Tunneling in Strongly Driven Double Well Potentials
• Observation of photon-assisted tunneling in optical lattices
• Exploring dynamic localization with a Bose-Einstein condensate
• Avoided level crossing spectroscopy with dressed matter waves
• Instability and control of a periodically-driven Bose-Einstein condensate
• Controlled generation of coherent matter-currents using a periodic driving field
• Photon-assisted tunneling in optical lattices: Ballistic transport of interacting boson pairs
• Dressed matter waves
• Generation of mesoscopic superpositions of a binary Bose-Einstein condensate in a slightly asymmetric double well