Mott transition in anharmonic confinement

Abstract

Two effects are identified that affect the visibility of the Mott transition in an atomic gas in an optical lattice confined in a power-law potential. The transition can be made more pronounced by increasing the power law, but at the same time, experimental uncertainty in the number of particles will induce corresponding fluctuations in the measured condensate fraction. Calculations in two dimensions indicate that a potential slightly more flat-bottomed than a quadratic one is to be preferred for a wide range of particle number fluctuation size.

4 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Imaging the Mott Insulator Shells using Atomic Clock Shifts
• Formation of spatial shell structures in the superfluid to Mott insulator transition

Cited by in corpus (1)

• One-dimensional phase transitions in a two-dimensional optical lattice