Transport, atom blockade and output coupling in a Tonks-Girardeau gas

TL;DR

This paper develops a phenomenological model for atom transport and output coupling in a Tonks-Girardeau gas, predicting atom blockade and stable mixed-species quantum gases in strongly correlated regimes.

Contribution

It introduces a new model that qualitatively matches experimental observations and predicts atom blockade phenomena in strongly correlated quantum gases.

Findings

Qualitative agreement with experimental atom transport data

Prediction of atom blockade regime in the gas

Proposal of stable mixed-species quantum gases

Abstract

Recent experiments have demonstrated how quantum-mechanical impurities can be created within strongly correlated quantum gases and used to probe the coherence properties of these systems [S. Palzer, C. Zipkes, C. Sias, and M. K\"ohl, Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 150601 (2009).]. Here we present a phenomenological model to simulate such an output coupler for a Tonks-Girardeau gas that shows qualitative agreement with the experimental results for atom transport and output coupling. Our model allows us to explore nonequilibrium transport phenomena in ultracold quantum gases and leads us to predict a regime of atom blockade, where the impurity component becomes localized in the parent cloud despite the presence of gravity. We show that this provides a stable mixed-species quantum gas in the strongly correlated limit.