Quantum damping of Fermi-Pasta-Ulam revivals in ultracold Bose gases

TL;DR

This paper proposes an experimental setup using ultracold Bose gases in optical lattices to explore quantum effects on Fermi-Pasta-Ulam revivals, revealing how quantum fluctuations dampen these oscillations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental scheme and numerical analysis to study quantum damping of FPU revivals in ultracold Bose gases, linking quantum fluctuations to oscillation damping.

Findings

Quantum fluctuations cause significant damping of FPU revivals.

The damping effect depends on the filling factor of atoms per lattice site.

Numerical simulations confirm the impact of quantum effects on classical recurrence phenomena.

Abstract

We propose an experimental scheme for studying the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) phenomenon in a quantum mechanical regime using ultracold atoms. Specifically, we suggest and analyze a setup of one-dimensional Bose gases confined into an optical lattice. The strength of quantum fluctuations is controlled by tuning the number of atoms per lattice sites (filling factor). By simulating the real-time dynamics of the Bose-Hubbard model by means of the exact numerical method of time-evolving block decimation, we investigate the effects of quantum fluctuations on the FPU recurrence and show that strong quantum fluctuations cause significant damping of the FPU oscillation.