"Cold Atoms in optical lattices: pushing Bose-Einstein condensates beyond mean-field"
Trey Porto
Wednesday, March 3, 2004, 11AM -12:00 Noon in 375 LeConte Hall
NIST, Gaithersburg
Abstract
The majority of experiments with quantum degenerate gases have been
performed in the weakly interacting limit, on Bose-Einstein condensates characterized
by long-range phase coherence and well described by the mean-field Gross-Pitaevskii
equation. While the success of the GP equation in accounting for many experimental
results has been spectacular, it has also led to the search for physics beyond
mean-field theory. It has recently been realized that loading atoms into optical
lattices can produce interesting, correlated many-body states by reducing the
dimensionality, increasing the interactions between particles and decreasing
the quantum kinetic (or tunnelling) energy. Cold atoms in a sufficiently deep optical
lattice provide a nearly perfect realization of the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian,
which allows for a zero particle correlations and transport properties of trapped 1D
Bose gases, realized by loading a BEC into an optical lattice.
