Arxiv Selection Feb 2020

Feb 1- Feb 7 Bhaskar Mukherjee, Feb 8- Feb 14 Zehan Li, Feb 15- Feb 21 Haiping Hu, Feb 22- Feb 28 Sayan Choudhury

Feb 11

arXiv:2002.03051 [pdf, other]

Non-exponential decay in Floquet-Bloch bands

Alec Cao, Cora J. Fujiwara, Roshan Sajjad, Ethan Q. Simmons, Eva Lindroth, David M. Weld

Comments: 7 pages, 5 figures

Subjects: Quantum Gases (cond-mat.quant-gas); Atomic Physics (physics.atom-ph); Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

Exponential decay laws describe sys- tems ranging from unstable nuclei to fluorescent molecules, in which the probability of jumping to a lower-energy state in any given time interval is static and history-independent. These decays, in- volving only a metastable state and fluctuations of the quantum vacuum, are the most fundamental nonequilibrium process, and provide a microscopic model for the origins of irreversibility. Despite the fact that the apparently universal exponential decay law has been precisely tested in a variety of physi- cal systems [1], it is a surprising truth that quantum mechanics requires that spontaneous decay pro- cesses have non-exponential time dependence at both very short and very long times [2, 3]. Cold- atom experiments both classic [4] and recent [5] have proven to be powerful probes of fundamen- tal decay processes; in this paper, we propose the use of Bose condensates in Floquet-Bloch bands as a probe of long-time non-exponential decay in single isolated emitters. We identify a range of parameters that should enable observation of long- time deviations, and experimentally demonstrate a key element of the scheme: tunable decay between quasienergy bands in a driven optical lattice.