Slow Mass Transport and Statistical Evolution of An Atomic Gas Across the Superfluid-Mott Insulator Transition

Abstract

We study transport dynamics of ultracold cesium atoms in a two-dimensional optical lattice across the superfluid-Mott insulator transition based on in situ imaging. Inducing the phase transition with a lattice ramping routine expected to be locally adiabatic, we observe a global mass redistribution which requires a very long time to equilibrate, more than 100 times longer than the microscopic time scales for on-site interaction and tunneling. When the sample enters the Mott insulator regime, mass transport significantly slows down. By employing fast recombination pulses to analyze the occupancy distribution, we observe similarly slow-evolving dynamics, and a lower effective temperature at the center of the sample.

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• Strongly Interacting Two-Dimensional Bose Gases
• Slow quench dynamics of a trapped one-dimensional Bose gas confined to an optical lattice
• Enlarging and cooling the Néel state in an optical lattice
• Relaxation dynamics of a Fermi gas in an optical superlattice
• Quantum Criticality from in-situ Density Imaging
• Exploring quantum criticality based on ultracold atoms in optical lattices
• Effect of interactions on harmonically confined Bose-Fermi mixtures in optical lattices
• Quench from Mott Insulator to Superfluid
• Static and Dynamic Properties of Interacting Spin-1 Bosons in an Optical Lattice
• Controlling Transport of Ultra-Cold Atoms in 1D Optical Lattices with Artificial Gauge Fields
• Critical phenomena in one dimension from a Bethe ansatz perspective
• Phase-induced transport in atomic gases: from superfluid to Mott insulator
• Exotic pairing in 1D spin-3/2 atomic gases with $SO(4)$ symmetry
• Role of interactions in time-of-flight expansion of atomic clouds from optical lattices
• Loading and detecting a three-dimensional Fermi gas in one-dimensional optical superlattice
• Dynamics of the Mott Insulator to Superfluid quantum phase transition in the truncated Wigner approximation