Dynamical arrest of ultracold lattice fermions.

We theoretically investigate the thermodynamics of an interacting inhomogeneous two-component Fermi gas in an optical lattice. Motivated by a recent experiment by L. Hackermüller et al., Science 327, 1621 (2010), we study the effect of the interplay between thermodynamics and strong correlations on the size of the fermionic cloud. We use dynamical mean-field theory to compute the cloud size, which in the experiment shows an anomalous expansion behavior upon increasing attractive interaction. We confirm this qualitative effect but, assuming adiabaticity, we find quantitative agreement only for weak interactions. For strong interactions we observe significant nonequilibrium effects which we attribute to a dynamical arrest of the particles due to increasing correlations.

Effect of interactions on harmonically confined Bose-Fermi mixtures in optical lattices.

We investigate a Bose-Fermi mixture in a three-dimensional optical lattice, trapped in a harmonic potential. Using generalized dynamical mean-field theory, which treats the Bose-Bose and Bose-Fermi interaction in a fully nonperturbative way, we show that for experimentally relevant parameters a peak in the condensate fraction close to the point of vanishing Bose-Fermi interaction is reproduced within a single-band framework. We identify two physical mechanisms contributing to this effect: the spatial redistribution of particles when the interspecies interaction is changed and the reduced phase space for strong interactions, which results in a higher temperature at fixed entropy.

Vortex-lattice melting in a one-dimensional optical lattice.

We investigate quantum fluctuations of a vortex lattice in a one-dimensional optical lattice for realistic numbers of particles and vortices. Our method gives full access to all the modes of the vortex lattice and we discuss in particular the Bloch bands of the Tkachenko modes. Because of the small number of particles in the pancake Bose-Einstein condensates at every site of the optical lattice, finite-size effects become very important. Therefore, the fluctuations in the vortex positions are inhomogeneous and the melting of the lattice occurs from the outside inwards. By looking into correlations between neighboring vortices, we identify new solid and liquid phases. Tunneling between neighboring pancakes substantially reduces the inhomogeneity as well as the size of the fluctuations.

Ultracold superstrings in atomic boson-fermion mixtures.

We propose a setup with ultracold atomic gases that can be used to make a nonrelativistic superstring in four spacetime dimensions. In particular, we consider for the creation of the superstring a fermionic atomic gas that is trapped in the core of a vortex in a Bose-Einstein condensate. We explain the required tuning of experimental parameters to achieve supersymmetry between the fermionic atoms and the bosonic modes describing the oscillations in the vortex position. Furthermore, we discuss the experimental consequences of supersymmetry.