Intrinsic Photoconductivity of Ultracold Fermions in Optical Lattices

Abstract

We report on the experimental observation of an analog to a persistent alternating photocurrent in an ultracold gas of fermionic atoms in an optical lattice. The dynamics is induced and sustained by an external harmonic confinement. While particles in the excited band exhibit long-lived oscillations with a momentum dependent frequency a strikingly different behavior is observed for holes in the lowest band. An initial fast collapse is followed by subsequent periodic revivals. Both observations are fully explained by mapping the system onto a nonlinear pendulum.

5+7 pages, 4+4 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Ultracold atomic gases in optical lattices: mimicking condensed matter physics and beyond
• Orbital superfluidity in the $P$-band of a bipartite optical square lattice
• State preparation and dynamics of ultracold atoms in higher lattice orbitals
• Dynamics of a many-particle Landau-Zener model: inverse sweep

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Probing the bond order wave phase transitions of the ionic Hubbard model by superlattice modulation spectroscopy
• Single-particle Analysis of Non-interacting Ultracold Bosons in Amplitude Modulated Parabolic Optical Lattice
• Optical spin conductivity in ultracold quantum gases
• Loading and detecting a three-dimensional Fermi gas in one-dimensional optical superlattice
• Loading ultracold atoms onto nonlinear Bloch states and soliton states in bichromatic lattices