Dissipative dynamics of atomic Hubbard models coupled to a phonon bath: dark state cooling of atoms within a Bloch band of an optical lattice

We analyse a laser assisted sympathetic cooling scheme for atoms within the lowest Bloch band of an optical lattice. This scheme borrows ideas from sub-recoil laser cooling, implementing them in a new context in which the atoms in the lattice are coupled to a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) reservoir. In this scheme, excitation of atoms between Bloch bands replaces the internal structure of atoms in normal laser cooling, and spontaneous emission of photons is replaced by creation of excitations in the BEC reservoir. We analyse the cooling process for many bosons and fermions, and obtain possible temperatures corresponding to a small fraction of the Bloch band width within our model. This system can be seen as a novel realisation of a many-body open quantum system.Citation: Griessner, A., Daley, A. J., Clark, S. R., Jaksch, D. & Zoller, P. (2007). 'Dissipative dynamics of atomic Hubbard models coupled to a phonon bath: dark state cooling of atoms within a Bloch band of an optical lattice', New Journal of Physics, 9(2), 44. [Available at http://www.njp.org]. This is an Open Access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial ShareAlike 2.5 licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/deed.en_GB). This licence permits third-party users to copy, distribute and display the published version of the article, and create derivative works, subject to appropriate acknowledgement of the original authors, and provided the article is not used for commercial purposes. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the licence terms of this work