For nearly three decades ultracold atomic gases have been used with great success to study fundamental many-body phenomena such as Bose-Einstein condensation and superfluidity. While traditionally they were produced in harmonic electromagnetic traps and thus had inhomogeneous densities, it is now possible to create homogeneous samples in the uniform potential of an optical box trap [1]. Box-trapping simplifies the interpretation of measurements, provides more direct connections with theory and, in some cases, allows qualitatively new experiments.
I will give a brief introduction to the experiments with box-trapped gases and then focus on our recent studies of far-from-equilibrium phenomena, including turbulence [2,3], driven disordered gases [4], and universal coarsening dynamics.
[1] Quantum gases in optical boxes (review), N. Navon, R. P. Smith, and Z. Hadzibabic, Nat. Phys. 17, 1334 (2021).
[2] Emergence of isotropy and dynamic scaling in 2D wave turbulence in a homogeneous Bose gas, M. Galka et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 190402 (2022).
[3] Universal equation of state for wave turbulence in a quantum gas, L. H. Dogra et al., Nature 620, 521 (2023).
[4] Observation of subdiffusive dynamic scaling in a driven and disordered box-trapped Bose gas, G. Martirosyan et al., arXiv:2304.06697
Host: Nir Navon (nir.navon@yale.edu)