The Bose-Hubbard model with localized particle losses

TL;DR

This paper investigates the effects of localized particle losses in the Bose-Hubbard model, revealing conditions under which particles are protected from dissipation and analyzing the impact of interactions and imperfections.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of particle protection mechanisms in the Bose-Hubbard model with localized losses, including non-interacting and weakly interacting regimes.

Findings

Half of the bosons remain unaffected by localized dissipation in the non-interacting case.

A fraction of particles can tunnel across the dissipative defect despite slow tunneling rates.

Interactions destroy phase coherence, leading to complete decay of particles.

Abstract

We consider the Bose-Hubbard model with particle losses at one lattice site. For the non-interacting case, we find that half of the bosons of an initially homogeneous particle distribution, are not affected by dissipation that only acts on one lattice site in the center of the lattice. A physical interpretation of this result is that the surviving particles interfere destructively when they tunnel to the location of the dissipative defect and therefore never reach it. Furthermore we find for a one-dimensional model that a fraction of the particles can propagate across the dissipative defect even if the rate of tunneling between adjacent lattice sites is much slower than the loss rate at the defect. In the interacting case, the phase coherence is destroyed and all particles eventually decay. We thus analyze the effect of small interactions and small deviations from the perfectly symmetric setting on the protection of the particles against the localized losses. A possible experimental realization of our setup is provided by ultracold bosonic atoms in an optical lattice, where an electron beam on a single lattice site ionizes atoms that are then extracted by an electrostatic field.