Population dynamics in Floquet realisation of Harper-Hofstadter Hamiltonian

TL;DR

This paper investigates the dynamics and heating effects in a Floquet-engineered Harper-Hofstadter system with cold atoms, analyzing scattering processes and proposing methods to suppress unwanted transitions for future strongly interacting experiments.

Contribution

It provides a detailed theoretical analysis of scattering-induced heating and band transitions in Floquet Harper-Hofstadter systems, aligning with experimental observations and suggesting suppression strategies.

Findings

Agreement between theoretical transition rates and experimental band dynamics

Identification of photon-assisted collisions as a heating source

Proposed design modifications to reduce heating in future experiments

Abstract

We study the recent Floquet-realisation of the Harper-Hofstadter model in a gas of cold bosonic atoms. We study in detail the scattering processes in this system in the weakly interacting regime due to the interplay of particle interactions and the explicit time dependence of the Floquet states that lead to band transitions and heating. We focus on the experimentally used parameters and explicitly model the transverse confining direction. Based on transition rates computed within the Floquet-Fermi golden rule we obtain band population dynamics which are in agreement with the dynamics observed in experiment. Finally, we discuss whether and how photon-assisted collisions that may be the source heating and band population dynamics might be suppressed in the experimental setup by appropriate design of the transverse confining potential. The suppression of such processes will become increasingly important as the experiments progress into simulating strongly interacting systems in the presence of artificial gauge fields.