Bryce Gadway Abstract

Title: Strongly interacting bosonic mixtures in spin-dependent lattices

Abstract: Ultracold quantum gases have served as an ideal platform to implement model Hamiltonians and study the physics of, e.g., condensed matter systems at extremely low energies and long time scales. Here, we report on our experimental studies of homonuclear mixtures of ultracold neutral bosons (Rb-87) in spin-dependent optical lattices. This system allows us to explore phenomena not typically encountered in the single-species Hubbard model, including effects on lattice-bosons due to immersion in a superfluid "bath" (polaron formation, phonon mediated off-site interactions, etc.), as well as the effect of static "impurities" on the properties of one-dimensional [1D] Bose gases. In addition, we have introduced a new experimental detection technique based on the scattering of atomic matter-waves from ultracold atomic systems, in analogy to neutron diffraction experiments.