Browsing by Author "Wall, Michael L."
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Item Bosonic molecules in a lattice: Unusual fluid phase from multichannel interactions(American Physical Society, 2018) Ewart, Kevin D.; Wall, Michael L.; Hazzard, Kaden R.A.We show that multichannel interactions significantly alter the phase diagram of ultracold bosonic molecules in an optical lattice. Most prominently, an unusual fluid region intervenes between the conventional superfluid and the Mott insulator. In it, number fluctuations remain but phase coherence is suppressed by a significant factor. This factor can be made arbitrarily large, at least in a two-site configuration. We calculate the phase diagram using complementary methods, including Gutzwiller mean-field and density-matrix renormalization group calculations. Although we focus on bosonic molecules without dipolar interactions, we expect multichannel interactions to remain important for dipolar interacting and fermionic molecules.Item Cooling fermions in an optical lattice by adiabatic demagnetization(American Physical Society, 2018) Mirasola, Anthony E.; Wall, Michael L.; Hazzard, Kaden R.A.The Fermi-Hubbard model describes ultracold fermions in an optical lattice and exhibits antiferromagnetic long-ranged order below the Néel temperature. However, reaching this temperature in the laboratory has remained an elusive goal. In other atomic systems, such as trapped ions, low temperatures have been successfully obtained by adiabatic demagnetization, in which a strong effective magnetic field is applied to a spin-polarized system and the magnetic field is adiabatically reduced to zero. Unfortunately, applying this approach to the Fermi-Hubbard model encounters a fundamental obstacle: the SU(2) symmetry introduces many level crossings that prevent the system from reaching the ground state, even in principle. However, by breaking the SU(2) symmetry with a spin-dependent tunneling, we show that adiabatic demagnetization can achieve low-temperature states. Using density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) calculations in one dimension, we numerically find that demagnetization protocols successfully reach low-temperature states of a spin-anisotropic Hubbard model, and we discuss how to optimize this protocol for experimental viability. By subsequently ramping spin-dependent tunnelings to spin-independent tunnelings, we expect that our protocol can be employed to produce low-temperature states of the Fermi-Hubbard model.Item Effective many-body parameters for atoms in nonseparable Gaussian optical potentials(American Physical Society, 2015) Wall, Michael L.; Hazzard, Kaden R.A.; Rey, Ana Maria; Rice Center for Quantum MaterialsWe analyze the properties of particles trapped in three-dimensional potentials formed from superimposed Gaussian beams, fully taking into account effects of potential anharmonicity and nonseparability. Although these effects are negligible in more conventional optical lattice experiments, they are essential for emerging ultracold-atom developments. We focus in particular on two potentials utilized in current ultracold-atom experiments: arrays of tightly focused optical tweezers and a one-dimensional optical lattice with transverse Gaussian confinement and highly excited transverse modes. Our main numerical tools are discrete variable representations (DVRs), which combine many favorable features of spectral and grid-based methods, such as the computational advantage of exponential convergence and the convenience of an analytical representation of Hamiltonian matrix elements. Optimizations, such as symmetry adaptations and variational methods built on top of DVR methods, are presented and their convergence properties discussed. We also present a quantitative analysis of the degree of nonseparability of eigenstates, borrowing ideas from the theory of matrix product states, leading to both conceptual and computational gains. Beyond developing numerical methodologies, we present results for construction of optimally localized Wannier functions and tunneling and interaction matrix elements in optical lattices and tweezers relevant for constructing effective models for many-body physics.Item Ultracold Nonreactive Molecules in an Optical Lattice: Connecting Chemistry to Many-Body Physics(American Physical Society, 2016) Doçaj, Andris; Wall, Michael L.; Mukherjee, Rick; Hazzard, Kaden R.A.; Rice Center for Quantum MaterialsWe derive effective lattice models for ultracold bosonic or fermionic nonreactive molecules (NRMs) in an optical lattice, analogous to the Hubbard model that describes ultracold atoms in a lattice. In stark contrast to the Hubbard model, which is commonly assumed to accurately describe NRMs, we find that the single on-site interaction parameter U is replaced by a multichannel interaction, whose properties we elucidate. Because this arises from complex short-range collisional physics, it requires no dipolar interactions and thus occurs even in the absence of an electric field or for homonuclear molecules. We find a crossover between coherent few-channel models and fully incoherent single-channel models as the lattice depth is increased. We show that the effective model parameters can be determined in lattice modulation experiments, which, consequently, measure molecular collision dynamics with a vastly sharper energy resolution than experiments in a free-space ultracold gas.