Controlling Transport of Ultra-Cold Atoms in 1D Optical Lattices with Artificial Gauge Fields

Abstract

We show that the recently developed optical lattices with Peierls substitution -- which can be modeled as a lattice with a complex tunneling coefficient -- may be used to induce controllable quantum transport of ultra-cold atoms. In particular, we show that by ramping up the phase of the complex tunneling coefficient in a spatially uniform fashion, a finite quasi steady-state current (QSSC) ensues from the exact dynamics of non-interacting fermions. The direction and magnitude of the current can be controlled by the overall phase difference but not the details of the ramp. The entanglement entropy does not increase when the QSSC lasts. Due to different spin statistics, condensed non-interacting bosons do not support a finite QSSC under the same setup. We also find that an approximate form of the QSSC survives when perturbative effects from interactions, weak harmonic background traps, and finite-temperature are present, which suggests that our findings should be observable with available experimental capabilities.

5 pages, 3 figures

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Nonequilibrium relaxation transport of ultracold atoms
• Edge binding of sine-Gordon solitons in spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates
• Bloch oscillations of spin-orbit-coupled cold atoms in an optical lattice and spin current generation
• Challenges and constraints of dynamically emerged source and sink in atomtronic circuits: From closed-system to open-system approaches
• Nonlinear Floquet dynamics of spinor condensates in an optical cavity: Cavity-amplified parametric resonance
• Phase-induced transport in atomic gases: from superfluid to Mott insulator
• Quantification of the memory effect of steady-state currents from interaction-induced transport in quantum systems