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We theoretically consider ultracold polar molecules in a wave guide. The particles are bosons: They experience a periodic potential due to an optical lattice oriented along the wave guide and are polarized by an electric field orthogonal to the guide axis. The array is mechanically unstable by opening the transverse confinement in the direction orthogonal to the polarizing electric field and can undergo a transition to a double-chain (zigzag) structure. For this geometry we derive a multimode generalized Bose-Hubbard model for determining the quantum phases of the gas at the mechanical instability, taking into account the quantum fluctuations in all directions of space. Our model limits the dimension of the numerically relevant Hilbert subspace by means of an appropriate decomposition of the field operator, which is obtained from a field theoretical model of the linear-zigzag instability. We determine the phase diagrams of small systems using exact diagonalization and find that, even for tight transverse confinement, the aspect ratio between the two transverse trap frequencies controls not only the classical but also the quantum properties of the ground state in a nontrivial way. Convergence tests at the linear-zigzag instability demonstrate that our multimode generalized Bose-Hubbard model can catch the essential features of the quantum phases of dipolar gases in confined geometries with a limited computational effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the dynamical depinning following a sudden turn off of an optical lattice for a gas of impenetrable bosons in a tight atomic waveguide. We use a Bose-Fermi mapping to infer the exact quantum dynamical evolution. At long times, in the thermodynamic limit, we observe the approach to a nonequilibrium steady state, characterized by the absence of quasi-long-range order and a reduced visibility in the momentum distribution. Similar features are found in a finite-size system at times corresponding to half the revival time, where we find that the system approaches a quasisteady state with a power-law behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study quantum transport of an interacting confined one-dimensional Bose gas across a barrier. A sudden shift of the confining potential induces dipolar oscillations in the cloud. We find that the dipole mode frequency strongly depends on the interaction strength between the particles, yielding information on the classical screening of the barrier and on its renormalization due to quantum fluctuations. We predict a parity effect that becomes most prominent in the strongly correlated regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the effect of thermal and quantum fluctuations on the dynamical response of a one-dimensional, strongly interacting Bose gas in a tight atomic waveguide. We combine the Luttinger liquid theory at arbitrary interactions and the exact Bose-Fermi mapping in the Tonks-Girardeau impenetrable-boson limit to obtain the dynamic structure factor of the strongly interacting fluid at finite temperature. Then we determine the drag force felt by a potential barrier moving along the fluid in the experimentally realistic situation of finite barrier width and temperature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Particles with repulsive power-law interactions undergo a transition from a single to a double chain (zigzag) by decreasing the confinement in the transverse direction. We theoretically characterize this transition when the particles are classical dipoles, polarized perpendicularly to the plane in which the motion occurs, and argue that this transition is of first order, even though weakly. The nature of the transition is determined by the coupling between transverse and axial modes of the chain and contrasts with the behavior found in Coulomb systems, where the linear-zigzag transition is continuous and belongs to the universality class of the ferromagnetic transition. Our results hold for classical systems with power-law interactions 1/rα when α > 2 and show that structural transitions in dipolar systems and Rydberg atoms can offer a test bed for simulating the critical behavior of magnets with lattice coupling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe the dimensional crossover in a noninteracting Fermi gas in an anisotropic trap, obtained by populating various transverse modes of the trap. We study the dynamical structure factor and drag force. Starting from a dimension d, the (d + 1)-dimensional case is obtained to a good approximation with relatively few modes. We show that the dynamical structure factor of a gas in a d-dimensional harmonic trap simulates an effective 2d-dimensional box trap. We focus then on the experimentally relevant situation when only a portion of the gas in harmonic confinement is probed and give a condition to obtain the behavior of a d-dimensional gas in a box. Finally, we propose a generalized Tomonaga-Luttinger model for the multimode configuration and compare the dynamical structure factor in the two-dimensional limit with the exact result, finding that it is accurate in the backscattering region and at low energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study energy and particle transport for one-dimensional strongly interacting bosons through a ballistic single channel connecting two atomic reservoirs. We show the emergence of particle- and energy-current separation, leading to the violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law. As a consequence, we predict different time scales for the equilibration of temperature and particle imbalances between the reservoirs. Going beyond the linear spectrum approximation, we show the emergence of thermoelectric effects, which could be controlled by either tuning interactions or the temperature. Our results describe, in a unified picture, fermions in condensed-matter devices and bosons in ultracold atom setups. We conclude by discussing the effects of a controllable disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the exact solution for the many-body wavefunction of a one-dimensional mixture of bosons and spin-polarized fermions with equal masses and infinitely strong repulsive interactions under external confinement. Such a model displays a large degeneracy of the ground state. Using a generalized Bose-Fermi mapping, we find the solution for the whole set of ground-state wave functions of the degenerate manifold and we characterize them according to group-symmetry considerations. We find that the density profile and the momentum distribution depends on the symmetry of the solution. By combining the wave functions of the degenerate manifold with suitable symmetry and guided by the strong-coupling form of the Bethe-Ansatz solution for the homogeneous system, we propose an analytic expression for the many-body wave function of the inhomogeneous system which well describes the ground state at finite, large, and equal interaction strengths, as validated by numerical simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A universal κ-4 decay of the large-momentum tails of the momentum distribution, fixed by Tan's contact coefficients, constitutes a direct signature of strong correlations in a short-range interacting quantum gas. Here we consider a repulsive multicomponent Fermi gas under harmonic confinement, as in the experiment of G. Pagano et al. [Nat. Phys. 10, 198 (2014)], realizing a gas with tunable SU(κ) symmetry. We exploit an exact solution at infinite repulsion to show a direct correspondence between the value of the Tan's contact for each of the κ components of the gas and the Young tableaux for the SN permutation symmetry group identifying the magnetic structure of the ground state. This opens a route for the experimental determination of magnetic configurations in cold atomic gases, employing only standard (spin-resolved) time-of-flight techniques. Combining the exact result with matrix-product-state simulations, we obtain the Tan's contact at all values of repulsive interactions. We show that a local-density approximation (LDA) on the Bethe-ansatz equation of state for the homogeneous mixture is in excellent agreement with the results for the harmonically confined gas. At strong interactions, the LDA predicts a scaling behavior of the Tan's contact. This provides a useful analytical expression for the dependence on the number of fermions, number of components, and interaction strength. Moreover, using a virial approach, we study the Tan's contact behavior at high temperature and in the limit of infinite interactions, and we show that it increases with the temperature and the number of components. At zero temperature, we predict that the weight of the momentum distribution tails increases with interaction strength and the number of components if the population per component is kept constant. This latter property was experimentally observed in G. Pagano et al. [Nat. Phys. 10, 198 (2014)]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the localization transition of an atom confined by an external optical lattice in a high-finesse cavity. The atom-cavity coupling yields an effective secondary lattice potential, whose wavelength is incommensurate with the periodicity of the optical lattice. The cavity lattice can induce localization of the atomic wave function analogously to the Aubry-André localization transition. Starting from the master equation for the cavity and the atom we perform a mapping of the system dynamics to a Hubbard Hamiltonian, which can be reduced to the Harper's Hamiltonian in appropriate limits. We evaluate the phase diagram for the atom's ground state and show that the transition between extended and localized wave function is controlled by the strength of the cavity nonlinearity, which determines the size of the localized region and the behavior of the Lyapunov exponent. The Lyapunov exponent, in particular, exhibits resonancelike behavior in correspondence with the optomechanical resonances. Finally we discuss the experimental feasibility of these predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]