Off-resonant many-body quantum carpets in strongly tilted optical lattices

Abstract

An unit filling Bose-Hubbard Hamilonian embedded in strong Stark field is studied in the off-resonant regime inhibiting single and many-particle first order tunneling resonances. We investigate the occurrence of coherent dipole wave-like propagation along of an optical lattice by means of an effective Hamiltonian accounting for second order tunneling processes. It is shown that dipole wavefunction evolution in the short-time limit is ballistic and that finite size effects induce dynamical self-interference patterns known as quantum carperts. We also present the effects of the border right after the first reflection showing that the wavefunction diffuses normally with the variance changing linearly in time. This work extends the rich physical phenomenology of the tilted one dimensional lattice systems in a scenario of many interacting quantum particles, the so-called many-body Wannier-Stark system.