Obtaining the phase diagram and thermodynamic quantities of bulk systems from the densities of trapped gases

Abstract

Experiments that use cold atoms in optical lattices to simulate the behaviour of strongly correlated solid-state systems promise to provide insight into a range of long-standing problems in many-body physics. The goal of such quantum simulations is to obtain information about homogeneous systems. Cold-gas experiments, however, are carried out in spatially inhomogeneous confining traps, which leads inevitably to different phases in the sample. This makes it difficult to deduce the properties of homogeneous phases with standard density imaging, which averages over different phases. Moreover, important properties such as superfluid density are inaccessible by standard imaging techniques, and will remain inaccessible even when systems of interest are successfully simulated. Here, we present algorithms for mapping out several properties of homogeneous systems, including superfluid density. Our scheme makes explicit use of the inhomogeneity of the trap, an approach that might turn the source of difficulty into a means of constructing solutions. © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.