Quantum measurement-induced dynamics of many-body ultracold bosonic and fermionic systems in optical lattices

Journal article

Trapping ultracold atoms in optical lattices enabled numerous breakthroughs uniting several disciplines. Coupling these systems to quantized light leads to a plethora of new phenomena and has opened up a new field of study. Here we introduce a physically novel source of competition in a many-body strongly correlated system: We prove that quantum backaction of global measurement is able to efficiently compete with intrinsic short-range dynamics of an atomic system. The competition becomes possible due to the ability to change the spatial profile of a global measurement at a microscopic scale comparable to the lattice period without the need of single site addressing. In coherence with a general physical concept, where new competitions typically lead to new phenomena, we demonstrate novel nontrivial dynamical effects such as large-scale multimode oscillations, long-range entanglement and correlated tunneling, as well as selective suppression and enhancement of dynamical processes beyond the projective limit of the quantum Zeno effect. We demonstrate both the break-up and protection of strongly interacting fermion pairs by measurement. Such a quantum optical approach introduces into many-body physics novel processes, objects, and methods of quantum engineering, including the design of many-body entangled environments for open systems.

Authors: Mazzucchi, G; Kozlowski, W; Caballero-Benitez, S; Elliott, T; Mekhov, I

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: American Physical Society
• Journal: Physical Review A
• Volume: 93
• Issue: 2
• Article number: 023632
• Publication date: 2016-02-19
• Acceptance date: 2015-04-17
• DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.93.023632
• EISSN: 2469-9934
• ISSN: 2469-9926
• Keywords: physics.atom-ph; cond-mat.quant-gas; quant-ph; physics.optics