Designing arbitrary one-dimensional potentials on an atom chip.

We use laser light shaped by a digital micro-mirror device to realize arbitrary optical dipole potentials for one-dimensional (1D) degenerate Bose gases of 87Rb trapped on an atom chip. Superposing optical and magnetic potentials combines the high flexibility of optical dipole traps with the advantages of magnetic trapping, such as effective evaporative cooling and the application of radio-frequency dressed state potentials. As applications, we present a 160 µm long box-like potential with a central tuneable barrier, a box-like potential with a sinusoidally modulated bottom and a linear confining potential. These potentials provide new tools to investigate the dynamics of 1D quantum systems and will allow us to address exciting questions in quantum thermodynamics and quantum simulations.

Metropolis-Hastings thermal state sampling for numerical simulations of Bose-Einstein condensates.

We demonstrate the application of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm to sampling of classical thermal states of one-dimensional Bose-Einstein quasicondensates in the classical fields approximation, both in untrapped and harmonically trapped case. The presented algorithm can be easily generalized to higher dimensions and arbitrary trap geometry. For truncated Wigner simulations the quantum noise can be added with conventional methods (half a quantum of energy in every mode). The advantage of the presented method over the usual analytical and stochastic ones lies in its ability to sample not only from canonical and grand canonical distributions, but also from the generalized Gibbs ensemble, which can help to shed new light on thermodynamics of integrable systems.

Experimental observation of a generalized Gibbs ensemble.

The description of the non-equilibrium dynamics of isolated quantum many-body systems within the framework of statistical mechanics is a fundamental open question. Conventional thermodynamical ensembles fail to describe the large class of systems that exhibit nontrivial conserved quantities, and generalized ensembles have been predicted to maximize entropy in these systems. We show experimentally that a degenerate one-dimensional Bose gas relaxes to a state that can be described by such a generalized ensemble. This is verified through a detailed study of correlation functions up to 10th order. The applicability of the generalized ensemble description for isolated quantum many-body systems points to a natural emergence of classical statistical properties from the microscopic unitary quantum evolution.