Floquet engineering of correlated tunneling in the Bose-Hubbard model with ultracold atoms

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how Floquet engineering can control occupation-dependent tunneling in a Bose-Hubbard system of ultracold atoms, enabling tunable and suppressed tunneling dynamics with potential for creating density-dependent artificial gauge fields.

Contribution

The study experimentally implements and controls occupation-dependent tunneling in a Bose-Hubbard model using Floquet modulation, revealing explicit atom number dependence.

Findings

Tunable occupation-dependent tunneling achieved via Floquet modulation

Full suppression of tunneling observed in the system

Tunneling rate depends on atom number difference between sites

Abstract

We report on the experimental implementation of tunable occupation-dependent tunneling in a Bose-Hubbard system of ultracold atoms via time-periodic modulation of the on-site interaction energy. The tunneling rate is inferred from a time-resolved measurement of the lattice site occupation after a quantum quench. We demonstrate coherent control of the tunneling dynamics in the correlated many-body system, including full suppression of tunneling as predicted within the framework of Floquet theory. We find that the tunneling rate explicitly depends on the atom number difference in neighboring lattice sites. Our results may open up ways to realize artificial gauge fields that feature density dependence with ultracold atoms.