Role of interactions in time-of-flight expansion of atomic clouds from optical lattices

Abstract

We calculate the effect of interactions on the expansion of ultracold atoms from a single site of an optical lattice. We use these results to predict how interactions influence the interference pattern observed in a time of flight experiment. We find that for typical interaction strengths their influence is negligible, yet that they reduce visibility near a scattering resonance.

6 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Quantum phase transition from a superfluid to a Mott insulator in a gas of ultracold atoms
• Imaging the Mott Insulator Shells using Atomic Clock Shifts
• Exploring correlated 1D Bose gases from the superfluid to the Mott-insulator state by inelastic light scattering
• Condensate fraction in a 2D Bose gas measured across the Mott-insulator transition
• Expansion of a quantum gas released from an optical lattice
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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Two-body collisions in the time-of-flight dynamics of lattice Bose superfluids
• Metastable Bose-Einstein Condensation in a Strongly Correlated Optical Lattice
• Measurement of total phase fluctuation in cold-atomic quantum simulators
• Expansion of a one-dimensional Bose gas: the role of interactions and kinetic-energy driving