Superfluid-insulator transition in a moving system of interacting bosons
Anatoli Polkovnikov
Harvard University
Cold atomic systems with their high tunability and nearly perfect
isolation from environment became very attractive for studying
strongly correlated systems. Particularly exciting is the
possibility to address problems of quantum dynamics far from
equilibrium, which are beyond the reach of conventional condensed
matter systems.
Most of theoretical studies of dynamics in these systems employ
essentially classical (Gross-Pitaevskii) equations of motion. At
the same time in equilibrium a lot is known about various quantum
regimes, where the classical description does not work. In this
talk I will discuss a problem where both quantum and dynamic
effects are important. In particular, I will describe a moving
system of interacting bosons in a periodic optical lattice
potential and generalize the conventional superfluid-Mott
insulator transition to this highly non-equilibrium situation. I
will discuss implications of our results to recent and future
experiments.