Dynamical arrest of ultracold lattice fermions

Abstract

We theoretically investigate the thermodynamics of an interacting inhomogeneous two-component Fermi gas in an optical lattice. Motivated by a recent experiment by L. Hackermüller et al., Science, 327, 1621 (2010), we study the effect of the interplay between thermodynamics and strong correlations on the size of the fermionic cloud. We use dynamical mean-field theory to compute the cloud size, which in the experiment shows an anomalous expansion behavior upon increasing attractive interaction. We confirm this qualitative effect but, assuming adiabaticity, we find quantitative agreement only for weak interactions. For strong interactions we observe significant non-equilibrium effects which we attribute to a dynamical arrest of the particles due to increasing correlations.

arXiv comment4.5 pages, 5 figures (slightly different from published version)

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Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Cooling through quantum criticality and many-body effects in condensed matter and cold gases
• Thermal conductivity of the one-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model
• Inhomogeneous BCS-BEC crossover for trapped cold atoms in optical lattices
• Comparison of the Iterated Equation of Motion Approach and the Density Matrix Formalism for the Quantum Rabi Model
• Orbital ordering of ultracold alkaline-earth atoms in optical lattices
• Emergent non-trivial lattices for topological insulators