Expansion dynamics of interacting bosons in homogeneous lattices in one and two dimensions

Jens Philipp Ronzheimer, Michael Schreiber, Simon Braun, Sean S. Hodgman, Stephan Langer, Ian P. McCulloch, Fabian Heidrich-Meisner, Immanuel Bloch, Ulrich Schneider

Published 2013-01-22, updated 2013-05-15Version 3

We experimentally and numerically investigate the expansion of initially localized ultracold bosons in homogeneous one- and two-dimensional optical lattices. We find that both dimensionality and interaction strength crucially influence these non-equilibrium dynamics. While the atoms expand ballistically in all integrable limits, deviations from these limits dramatically suppress the expansion and lead to the appearance of almost bimodal cloud shapes, indicating diffusive dynamics in the center surrounded by ballistic wings. For strongly interacting bosons, we observe a dimensional crossover of the dynamics from ballistic in the one-dimensional hard-core case to diffusive in two dimensions, as well as a similar crossover when higher occupancies are introduced into the system.