2013/10/31 by Bihui Zhu, Bryce Gadway, Michael Foss-Feig +10 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #quant-ph #cond-mat.quant-gas #physics.atom-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.112.070404
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 070404 (2014) · 4+ pages main text, 4 figures. 3 pages supplementary material, 2 figures
arxiv created 2013/12/17 · arxiv updated 2014/02/25
We investigate theoretically the suppression of two-body losses when the on-site loss rate is larger than all other energy scales in a lattice. This work quantitatively explains the recently observed suppression of chemical reactions between two rotational states of fermionic KRb molecules confined in one-dimensional tubes with a weak lattice along the tubes [Yan et al., Nature 501, 521-525 (2013)]. New loss rate measurements performed for different lattice parameters but under controlled initial conditions allow us to show that the loss suppression is a consequence of the combined effects of lattice confinement and the continuous quantum Zeno effect. A key finding, relevant for generic strongly reactive systems, is that while a single-band theory can qualitatively describe the data, a quantitative analysis must include multiband effects. Accounting for these effects reduces the inferred molecule filling fraction by a factor of five. A rate equation can describe much of the data, but to properly reproduce the loss dynamics with a fixed filling fraction for all lattice parameters we develop a mean-field model and benchmark it with numerically exact time-dependent density matrix renormalization group calculations.