Slow quench dynamics of a trapped one-dimensional Bose gas confined to an optical lattice

Jean-Sebastien Bernier (Ecole Polytechnique)

Date: Friday March 18
Time: 2:30pm
Location: Hennings 309B

To shed light on how the evolution of bosonic systems is affected by the rate of change of control parameters, cold atom experimentalists have recently reported several realizations of quantum quenches. Motivated by these experiments, we analyze the effect of a linear time-variation of the interaction strength on a trapped one-dimensional Bose gas confined to an optical lattice. The evolution of different observables such as the experimentally accessible onsite particle distribution are studied as a function of the ramp time using time-dependent exact diagonalization and density-matrix renormalization group techniques. We find that the dynamics of a trapped system typically display two regimes: for long ramp times, the dynamics are governed by density redistribution, while at short ramp times, local dynamics dominate as the evolution is identical to that of an homogeneous system. In the homogeneous limit, we find that the absorbed energy scales non-trivially with the ramp time.