Thermometry of cold atoms in optical lattices via artificial gauge fields

Abstract

Artificial gauge fields are a unique way of manipulating the motional state of cold atoms. Here we propose the use of artificial gauge fields -- obtained e.g. via lattice shaking -- to perform primary noise thermometry of cold atoms in optical lattices - not requiring any form of prior calibration. The proposed thermometric scheme relies on fundamental fluctuation-dissipation relations, connecting the global response to the variation of the applied gauge field and the fluctuation of quantities related to the momentum distribution (such as the average kinetic energy or the average current). We demonstrate gauge-field thermometry for several physical situations, including free fermions and strongly interacting bosons. The proposed approach is extremely robust to quantum fluctuations - even in the vicinity of a quantum phase transition - when it relies on the thermal fluctuations of an emerging classical field, associated with the onset of Bose condensation or chiral order.

5+5 pages, 3+8 figures; v2: a few errors fixed, plus an important conceptual improvement

References in corpus (8)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Single-Atom Resolved Fluorescence Imaging of an Atomic Mott Insulator
• Dynamical control of matter-wave tunneling in periodic potentials
• Tunable gauge potential for neutral and spinless particles in driven lattices
• Phase diagram of a two-component Fermi gas with resonant interactions
• Cooling in strongly correlated optical lattices: prospects and challenges
• Bose-Hubbard phase diagram with arbitrary integer filling
• Kilohertz-driven Bose-Einstein condensates in optical lattices

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Light-induced gauge fields for ultracold atoms
• Cooling and thermometry of atomic Fermi gases
• Thermometry of bosonic mixtures in Optical Lattices via Demixing
• Thermometry of ultracold fermions by (super)lattice modulation spectroscopy
• Configuration-dependent precision in magnetometry and thermometry using multi-qubit quantum sensors