Doublon production rate in modulated optical lattices

TL;DR

This paper provides a theoretical analysis of doublon production rates in modulated optical lattices with ultracold fermions, offering analytical formulas and experimental agreement, and proposes a new method for thermometry.

Contribution

It introduces analytical expressions for doublon production rates in strongly interacting fermionic optical lattices and demonstrates their use for thermometry in experiments.

Findings

Analytical formulas match experimental data.

Doublon production rate depends on modulation frequency, filling, and temperature.

Lattice modulation can serve as a thermometry tool for fermionic ensembles.

Abstract

We study theoretically lattice modulation experiments with ultracold fermions in optical lattices. We focus on the regime relevant to current experiments when interaction strength is larger than the bandwidth and temperature is higher than magnetic superexchange energy. We obtain analytical expressions for the rate of doublon production as a function of modulation frequency, filling factor, and temperature. We use local density approximation to average over inhomogeneous density for atoms in a parabolic trap and find excellent agreement with experimentally measured values. Our results suggest that lattice modulation experiments can be used for thermometry of strongly interacting fermionic ensembles in optical lattices.