2003/11/30 by H. Ott, Herwig Ott, E. de Mirandes +6
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Quantum optics and atomic interactions #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.92.160601
4 pages, 3 figures
openalex publication_date 2004/04/20 · arxiv created 2004/04/26 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study the transport of ultracold atoms in a tight optical lattice. For identical fermions the system is insulating under an external force while for bosonic atoms it is conducting. This reflects the different collisional properties of the particles and reveals the role of interparticle collisions in establishing a macroscopic transport in a perfectly periodic potential. Also in the case of fermions we can induce a transport by creating a collisional regime through the addition of bosons. We investigate the transport as a function of the collisional rate and observe a transition from a regime in which the mobility increases with increasing collisional rate to one in which it decreases. We compare our data with a theoretical model for electron transport in solids introduced by Esaki and Tsu.