Equilibrium and off-equilibrium trap-size scaling in 1D ultracold bosonic gases

Abstract

We study some aspects of equilibrium and off equilibrium quantum dynamics of dilute bosonic gases in the presence of a trapping potential. We consider systems with a fixed number of particles N and study their scaling behavior with increasing the trap size. We focus on one-dimensional (1D) bosonic systems, such as gases described by the Lieb-Liniger model and its Tonks-Girardeau limit of impenetrable bosons, and gases constrained in optical lattices as described by the Bose-Hubbard model. We study their quantum (zero-temperature) behavior at equilibrium and off equilibrium during the unitary time evolution arising from changes of the trapping potential, which may be instantaneous or described by a power-law time dependence, starting from the equilibrium ground state for a initial trap size. Renormalization-group scaling arguments, analytical and numerical calculations show that the trap-size dependence of the equilibrium and off-equilibrium dynamics can be cast in the form of a trap-size scaling in the low-density regime, characterized by universal power laws of the trap size, in dilute gases with repulsive contact interactions and lattice systems described by the Bose-Hubbard model. The scaling functions corresponding to several physically interesting observables are computed. Our results are of experimental relevance for systems of cold atomic gases trapped by tunable confining potentials.