Tuning the Mott transition in a Bose-Einstein condensate by multi-photon absorption

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how periodic driving fields can precisely control the Mott insulator to superfluid transition in a Bose-Einstein condensate within an optical lattice, revealing multi-photon resonances that enable sharp tunneling suppression.

Contribution

It introduces a method to tune the Mott transition using multi-photon resonances induced by periodic driving in a Bose-Hubbard model.

Findings

Sharp peaks in tunneling destruction at resonant frequencies

Controlled quantum phase transition between Mott insulator and superfluid

Waveform optimization enhances the tunneling suppression effect

Abstract

We study the time-dependent dynamics of a Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in an optical lattice. Modeling the system as a Bose-Hubbard model, we show how applying a periodic driving field can induce coherent destruction of tunneling. In the low-frequency regime, we obtain the novel result that the destruction of tunneling displays extremely sharp peaks when the driving frequency is resonant with the depth of the trapping potential (``multi-photon resonances''), which allows the quantum phase transition between the Mott insulator and the superfluid state to be controlled with high precision. We further show how the waveform of the field can be chosen to maximize this effect.