Pinning quantum phase transition for a Luttinger liquid of strongly interacting bosons

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Haller, Elmar and Hart, R. and Mark, M.J. and Danzl, J.G. and Reichsoellner, L. and Gustavsson, M. and Dalmonte, M. and Pupillo, Guido and Naegerl, H.-C. (2010) Pinning quantum phase transition for a Luttinger liquid of strongly interacting bosons. Nature, 466 (7306). pp. 597-600. ISSN 0028-0836 (https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09259)

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Abstract

Quantum many-body systems can have phase transitions(1) even at zero temperature; fluctuations arising from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, as opposed to thermal effects, drive the system from one phase to another. Typically, during the transition the relative strength of two competing terms in the system's Hamiltonian changes across a finite critical value. A well-known example is the Mott-Hubbard quantum phase transition from a superfluid to an insulating phase(2,3), which has been observed for weakly interacting bosonic atomic gases. However, for strongly interacting quantum systems confined to lower-dimensional geometry, a novel type(4,5) of quantum phase transition may be induced and driven by an arbitrarily weak perturbation to the Hamiltonian. Here we observe such an effect-the sine-Gordon quantum phase transition from a superfluid Luttinger liquid to a Mott insulator(6,7)-in a one-dimensional quantum gas of bosonic caesium atoms with tunable interactions. For sufficiently strong interactions, the transition is induced by adding an arbitrarily weak optical lattice commensurate with the atomic granularity, which leads to immediate pinning of the atoms. We map out the phase diagram and find that our measurements in the strongly interacting regime agree well with a quantum field description based on the exactly solvable sine-Gordon model(8). We trace the phase boundary all the way to the weakly interacting regime, where we find good agreement with the predictions of the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model. Our results open up the experimental study of quantum phase transitions, criticality and transport phenomena beyond Hubbard-type models in the context of ultracold gases.

ORCID iDs

Haller, Elmar ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7951-1721, Hart, R., Mark, M.J., Danzl, J.G., Reichsoellner, L., Gustavsson, M., Dalmonte, M., Pupillo, Guido and Naegerl, H.-C.;
  • Item type:Article
    ID code:43329
    Dates:
    Date
    Event
    29 July 2010
    Published
    Subjects:Science > Physics
    Department:Faculty of Science > Physics
    Depositing user: Pure Administrator
    Date deposited:26 Mar 2013 10:38
    Last modified:12 Dec 2024 02:47
    URI:https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/43329
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