Dresden 2009 – scientific programme
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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen
TT 41: Matter at Low Temperature: Quantum Liquids, Bose-Einstein-Condensates, Ultra-cold Atoms
TT 41.2: Talk
Thursday, March 26, 2009, 14:15–14:30, HSZ 105
Exploring Local Quantum Many-Body Relaxation by Atoms in Optical Superlattices — •Andreas Flesch1, Marcus Cramer2, Ian P. McCulloch3, Ulrich Schollwöck1, and Jens Eisert2,4 — 1Institut für Theoretische Physik C, RWTH Aachen University, 52056 Aachen, Germany — 2Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Imperial College London, SW7 2PE London, United Kingdom — 3School of Physical Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia — 4Institute for Physics and Astronomy, University of Potsdam, 14476 Potsdam, Germany
In the study of relaxation processes in coherent non-equilibrium dynamics of quenched quantum systems, ultracold atoms in optical superlattices with periodicity 2 provide a very fruitful test ground. We consider the dynamics of a particular, experimentally accessible initial state prepared in a superlattice structure evolving under a Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian in the entire range of interaction strengths [1,2]. We investigate the relaxation dynamics of certain correlation functions analytically in the non-interacting and hard-core bosonic limits and numerically for finite interaction strengths using a time-dependent density-matrix renormalization (t-DMRG) approach. Our results show that this setup allows to experimentally probe signatures of the process of local relaxation of subsystems in non-equilibrium dynamics without the need of addressing single sites by exploiting the possibilities offered by optical superlattices.
[1] M. Cramer et al., PRL 101, 063001 (2008)
[2] A. Flesch et al., PRA 78, 033608 (2008)