Experimental determination of Bose-Hubbard energies

Abstract

We present an experimental measurement of the ensemble averages of both the kinetic and interaction energies of the three-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model at finite temperature and various optical lattice depths across weakly to strongly interacting regimes, for an almost unit filling factor within single-band tight-binding approximation. The kinetic energy is obtained through Fourier transformation of a time-of-flight signal, and the interaction energy is measured using a newly developed atom-number-projection spectroscopy technique, by exploiting an ultranarrow optical transition of two-electron atoms. The obtained experimental results can be used as benchmarks for state-of-the-art numerical methods of quantum many-body theory. As an illustrative example, we compare the measured energies with numerical calculations involving the Gutzwiller and cluster-Gutzwiller approximations, assuming realistic trap potentials and particle numbers at nonzero entropy (finite temperature); we obtain good agreement without fitting parameters. We also discuss the possible application of this method to temperature estimations for atoms in optical lattices using the thermodynamic relation. This study offers a unique advantage of cold atom system for “quantum simulators.”