https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2008-00003-9
Mott transition in anharmonic confinement
Department of Physics, Umeå University, 90187 Umeå, Sweden
Corresponding author: a lundh@tp.umu.se
Received:
14
August
2007
Revised:
12
October
2007
Published online:
9
January
2008
Two effects are identified that affect the visibility of the Mott transition in an atomic gas in an optical lattice confined in a power-law potential. The transition can be made more pronounced by increasing the power law, but at the same time, experimental uncertainty in the number of particles will induce corresponding fluctuations in the measured condensate fraction. Calculations in two dimensions indicate that a potential slightly more flat-bottomed than a quadratic one is to be preferred for a wide range of particle number fluctuation size.
PACS: 03.75.Lm – Tunneling, Josephson effect, Bose-Einstein condensates in periodic potentials, solitons, vortices, and topological excitations
© EDP Sciences, Società Italiana di Fisica, Springer-Verlag, 2008
