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Tilted lattice potentials with periodic driving play a crucial role in the study of artificial gauge fields and topological phases with ultracold quantum gases. However, driving-induced heating and the growth of phonon modes restrict their use for probing interacting many-body states. Here, we experimentally investigate phonon modes and interaction-driven instabilities of superfluids in the lowest band of a shaken optical lattice. We identify stable and unstable parameter regions and provide a general resonance condition. In contrast to the high-frequency approximation of a Floquet description, we use the superfluids' micromotion to analyze the growth of phonon modes from slow to fast driving frequencies. Our observations enable the prediction of stable parameter regimes for quantum-simulation experiments aimed at studying driven systems with strong interactions over extended time scales., Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures

Single-atom imaging resolution of many-body quantum systems in optical lattices is routinely achieved with quantum-gas microscopes. Key to their great versatility as quantum simulators is the ability to use engineered light potentials at the microscopic level. Here, we employ dynamically varying microscopic light potentials in a quantum-gas microscope to study commensurate and incommensurate 1D systems of interacting bosonic Rb atoms. Such incommensurate systems are analogous to doped insulating states that exhibit atom transport and compressibility. Initially, a commensurate system with unit filling and fixed atom number is prepared between two potential barriers. We deterministically create an incommensurate system by dynamically changing the position of the barriers such that the number of available lattice sites is reduced while retaining the atom number. Our systems are characterised by measuring the distribution of particles and holes as a function of the lattice filling, and interaction strength, and we probe the particle mobility by applying a bias potential. Our work provides the foundation for preparation of low-entropy states with controlled filling in optical-lattice experiments., Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures

We experimentally investigate the stability of a quantum gas with repulsive interactions in an optical 1D lattice subjected to periodic driving. Excitations of the gas in the lowest lattice band are analyzed across the complete stability diagram, from slow to fast driving frequencies and from weak to strong driving strengths. To interpret our results, we expand the established analysis based on parametric instabilities to include modulational instabilities. Extending the concept of modulational instabilities from static to periodically driven systems provides a convenient mapping of the stability in a static system to the cases of slow and fast driving. At intermediate driving frequencies, we observe an interesting competition between modulational and parametric instabilities. We experimentally confirm the existence of both types of instabilities in driven systems and probe their properties. Our results allow us to predict stable and unstable parameter regions for the minimization of heating in future applications of Floquet driving., Comment: 13 pages, 15 figures

We experimentally study the dynamics of weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensates of cesium atoms in a 1D optical lattice with a periodic driving force. After a sudden start of the driving we observe the formation of stable wave packets at the center of the first Brillouin zone (BZ) in momentum space, and we interpret these as Floquet solitons in periodically driven systems. The wave packets become unstable when we add a trapping potential along the lattice direction leading to a redistribution of atoms within the BZ. The concept of a negative effective mass and the resulting changes to the interaction strength and effective trapping potential are used to explain the stability and the time evolution of the wave packets. We expect that similar states of matter waves exist for discrete breathers and other types of lattice solitons in periodically driven systems.

We study the evolution of a collisionally inhomogeneous matter wave in a spatial gradient of the interaction strength. Starting with a Bose-Einstein condensate with weak repulsive interactions in quasi-one-dimensional geometry, we monitor the evolution of a matter wave that simultaneously extends into spatial regions with attractive and repulsive interactions. We observe the formation and the decay of soliton-like density peaks, counter-propagating self-interfering wave packets, and the creation of cascades of solitons. The matter-wave dynamics is well reproduced in numerical simulations based on the nonpolynomial Schroedinger equation with three-body loss, allowing us to better understand the underlying behaviour based on a wavelet transformation. Our analysis provides new understanding of collapse processes for solitons, and opens interesting connections to other nonlinear instabilities.

We experimentally study the excitation modes of bright matter-wave solitons in a quasi-one-dimensional geometry. The solitons are created by quenching the interactions of a Bose-Einstein condensate of cesium atoms from repulsive to attractive in combination with a rapid reduction of the longitudinal confinement. A deliberate mismatch of quench parameters allows for the excitation of breathing modes of the emerging soliton and for the determination of its breathing frequency as a function of atom number and confinement. In addition, we observe signatures of higher-order solitons and the splitting of the wave packet after the quench. Our experimental results are compared to analytical predictions and to numerical simulations of the one-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation.

We report a bulk optics experiment demonstrating the possibility of restoring the entanglement distribution through noisy quantum channels by inserting a suitable unitary operation (filter) in the middle of the transmission process. We focus on two relevant classes of single-qubit channels consisting in repeated applications of rotated phase damping or rotated amplitude damping maps, both modeling the combined Hamiltonian and dissipative dynamics of the polarization state of single photons. Our results show that interposing a unitary filter between two noisy channels can significantly improve entanglement transmission. This proof-of-principle demonstration could be generalized to many other physical scenarios where entanglement-breaking communication lines may be amended by unitary filters., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures (three of them containing two internal images) and 1 table