In our lastest work we have used a resonantly driven optical lattice to turn the Mott transition into a first-order (discontinuous) transition. We were able to directly observe the associated hysteresis and metastability, where the system remains stuck in its original phase (the false vacuum) even though the ground state has changed.
In contrast to earlier work, we use a strongly correlated system of bosonic atoms in an optical lattice, where quantum fluctuations play an important role. This opens the door to studying the quantum decay of such a metastable state, termed false-vacuum decay, which is relevant in particle physics and cosmology as an analogue of the ‘Big Bang’ in inflationary universes.
Press release
https://www.phy.cam.ac.uk/news/towards-quantum-simulation-false-vacuum-decay
TCM Reserach Highlights
https://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/highlights/220120G4A_sd843/
Original Article
Realizing discontinuous quantum phase transitions in a strongly-correlated driven optical lattice
Bo Song, Shovan Dutta, Shaurya Bhave, Jr-Chiun Yu, Edward Carter, Nigel Cooper, Ulrich Schneider
Nature Physics 18, 259 (2022)