P. Blair Blakie

Bragg Spectroscopy of Ultracold Atoms Loaded in an Optical Lattice

We study Bragg spectroscopy of ultracold atoms in one-dimensional optical lattices as a method for probing the excitation spectrum in the Mott-insulator phase, in particular the one-particle-hole excitation band. Within the framework of perturbation theory we obtain an analytical expression for the dynamic structure factor

Critical temperature of a trapped Bose gas: comparison of theory and experiment.

S(q,\ensuremath{\omega})

Projected Gross-Pitaevskii equation for harmonically confined bose gases at finite temperature

and use it to calculate the imparted energy which was shown to be a relevant observable in recent experiments. We test the accuracy of our approximations by comparing them with numerically exact solutions of the Bose-Hubbard model in restricted cases and establish the limits of validity of our linear-response analysis. Finally we show that when the system is deep in the Mott-insulator regime, its response to the Bragg perturbation is temperature dependent. We suggest that this dependence might be used as a tool to probe temperatures of order of the Mott gap.

Wannier states and Bose-Hubbard parameters for 2D optical lattices

We apply the projected Gross-Pitaevskii equation (PGPE) formalism to the experimental problem of the shift in critical temperature Tc of a harmonically confined Bose gas as reported in Gerbier et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 030405 (2004). The PGPE method includes critical fluctuations and we find the results differ from various mean-field theories, and are in best agreement with experimental data. To unequivocally observe beyond mean-field effects, however, the experimental precision must either improve by an order of magnitude, or consider more strongly interacting systems. This is the first application of a classical field method to make quantitative comparison with experiment.

Vortex pairing in two-dimensional Bose gases

We extend the projected Gross-Pitaevskii equation formalism of Davis et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 160402 (2001)] to the experimentally relevant case of thermal Bose gases in harmonic potentials and outline a robust and accurate numerical scheme that can efficiently simulate this system. We apply this method to investigate the equilibrium properties of the harmonically trapped three-dimensional projected Gross-Pitaevskii equation at finite temperature and consider the dependence of condensate fraction, position, and momentum distributions and density fluctuations on temperature. We apply the scheme to simulate an evaporative cooling process in which the preferential removal of high-energy particles leads to the growth of a Bose-Einstein condensate. We show that a condensate fraction can be inferred during the dynamics even in this nonequilibrium situation.

Quantum Depletion Of Collapsing Bose-Einstein Condensates

We consider the physical implementation of a 2D optical lattice with schemes involving three and four light fields. We illustrate the wide range of geometries available to the 3-beam lattice, and compare the general potential properties of the two lattice schemes. Numerically calculating the band structure we obtain the Wannier states and evaluate the parameters of the Bose–Hubbard models relevant to these lattices. Using these results we demonstrate lattices that realize Bose–Hubbard models with 2, 4, or 6 nearest neighbours, and quantify the extent that these different lattices affect the superfluid to Mott-insulator transition.

Dynamical instabilities of Bose-Einstein condensates at the band edge in one-dimensional optical lattices

Recent experiments on ultracold Bose gases in two dimensions have provided evidence for the existence of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) phase via analysis of the interference between two independent systems. In this work we study the two-dimensional quantum degenerate Bose gas at finite temperature using the projected Gross-Pitaevskii equation classical field method. Although this describes the highly occupied modes of the gas below a momentum cutoff, we have developed a method to incorporate the higher momentum states in our model. We concentrate on finite-sized homogeneous systems in order to simplify the analysis of the vortex pairing. We determine the dependence of the condensate fraction on temperature and compare this to the calculated superfluid fraction. By measuring the first order correlation function we determine the boundary of the Bose-Einstein condensate and BKT phases, and find it is consistent with the superfluid fraction decreasing to zero. We reveal the characteristic unbinding of vortex pairs above the BKT transition via a coarse-graining procedure. Finally, we model the procedure used in experiments to infer system correlations [Hadzibabic et al., Nature 441, 1118 (2006)], and quantify its level of agreement with directly calculated in situ correlation functions.

Numerical method for evolving the projected Gross-Pitaevskii equation

We perform the first numerical three-dimensional studies of quantum field effects in the Bosenova experiment on collapsing condensates by E. Donley et al. [Nature (London) 415, 39 (2002)] using the exact experimental geometry. In a stochastic truncated Wigner simulation of the collapse, the collapse times are larger than the experimentally measured values. We find that a finite temperature initial state leads to an increased creation rate of uncondensed atoms, but not to a reduction of the collapse time. A comparison of the time-dependent Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov and Wigner methods for the more tractable spherical trap shows excellent agreement between the uncondensed populations. We conclude that the discrepancy between the experimental and theoretical values of the collapse time cannot be explained by Gaussian quantum fluctuations or finite temperature effects.

Classical region of a trapped Bose gas

We present a joint theoretical and experimental study of the dynamical instability of a Bose—Einstein condensate at the band edge of a one-dimensional optical lattice. The instability manifests as rapid depletion of the condensate and conversion to a thermal cloud. We consider the collisional processes that can occur in such a system, and undertake a thorough theoretical study of the dynamical instability in systems of different dimensionality. We find spontaneous scattering is an important part of this process, and thus the Gross-Pitaevskii equation is unable to accurately predict the dynamics in this system. Our beyond mean-field approach, known as the truncated Wigner method, allows us to make quantitative predictions for the processes of parametric growth and heating that are observed in the laboratory, and we find good agreement with the experimental results.

Finite-temperature phase diagram of a spin-1 Bose gas

In this paper we describe a method for evolving the projected Gross-Pitaevskii equation (PGPE) for a Bose gas in a harmonic oscillator potential. The central difficulty in solving this equation is the requirement that the classical field is restricted to a small set of prescribed modes that constitute the low energy classical region of the system. We present a scheme, using a Hermite-polynomial based spectral representation, that precisely implements this mode restriction and allows an efficient and accurate solution of the PGPE. We show equilibrium and nonequilibrium results from the application of the PGPE to an anisotropic trapped three-dimensional Bose gas.