Probing correlations of gaseous microwires in lattice potentials via inelastic light scattering

Year: 2011

Authors: Fabbri N.

Autors Affiliation: LENS, Università di Firenze, Sesto Fiorentino (FI), Italy

Abstract: In this work, inelastic light-scattering (Bragg spectroscopy) is used to study strongly correlated phases of ultracold 1D gases in optical lattices. We investigate the crossover from correlated superfluids to Mott insulators. Light-scattering creates in the system elementary excitations with non-zero momentum, and the response of the correlated gases is in the linear regime. This allows for extracting information about the atomic many-body state in terms of its particle-hole excitations, as common in solid-state physics. In particular, we characterize the Mott state both via intra-band and inter-band spectroscopy, the former giving access to the dynamical structure factor S(q, omega) and the latter to the one-particle spectral function A(q, omega).

Conference title: XCVI National Congress of the Italian Physical Society
Place:

Volume: 34 (5)      Pages from: 75  to: 84

More Information: This paper summarized some recent results achieved in the Quantum-Degenerate-Gases (QDG) group of Prof. M. Inguscio at the European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy (LENS), under the direct supervision of Dr. C. Fort. I am deeply indebted with both of them for their warm encouragement and enlightening advice. I would like to thank D. Clement, L. Fallani, and again C. Fort, for their fundamental contribution to the planning and implementation of the experiments above described, and M. Inguscio, for his stimulating direction the project. I also thank E. Altman and S. Huber from the Weizmann Institute of Science (Rehovot, Isreal), who have collaborated with us for the analysis of the inter-band response of a Mott state, in the framework of the LENS-Weizmann Joint Laboratory Initiative. Besides, I also acknowledge M. Modugno, T. Giamarchi, A. Iucci and M. Zvonarev for fruitful discussions, and K. M. R. van der Stam for early work on the experiment. This project has been supported by MIUR PRIN 2007, ECR Firenze, ERC-DISQUA Project, DQS EuroQUAM project from ESF, NAMEQUAM and AQUTE projects from EU.
KeyWords: isolante di Mott
DOI: 10.1393/ncc/i2011-10988-4