Experimental Study of the Role of Atomic Interactions on Quantum Transport

K. Henderson, H. Kelkar, B. Gutierrez-Medina, T. C. Li, M. G. Raizen

Published 2005-09-02, updated 2005-11-12Version 2

We report an experimental study of quantum transport for atoms confined in a periodic potential and compare between thermal and BEC initial conditions. We observe ballistic transport for all values of well depth and initial conditions, and the measured expansion velocity for thermal atoms is in excellent agreement with a single-particle model. For weak wells, the expansion of the BEC is also in excellent agreement with single-particle theory, using an effective temperature. We observe a crossover to a new regime for the BEC case as the well depth is increased, indicating the importance of interactions on quantum transport.