Trapped singly-charged ions can crystallize as a result of laser cooling. The emerging structure depends on the number of particles and on the geometry of the trapping potential. In linear multipole radiofrequency traps, the geometry of the radial potential can lead to the formation of single-ring structures. We analyse the conditions and stability of single rings as a function of the number of poles. The rings form tubes for a large number of ions and sufficiently small trap aspect ratios. In these structures the arrangement of the ions corresponds to a triangular lattice folded onto a cylinder. The stability of the tubular structures is numerically studied for different lattice constants and their normal mode spectrum is determined.

We theoretically consider ultracold polar molecules in a wave guide. The particles are bosons, they experience a periodic potential due to an optical lattice oriented along the wave guide and are polarised by an electric field orthogonal to the guide axis. The array is mechanically unstable by opening the transverse confinement in the direction orthogonal to the polarizing electric field and can undergo a transition to a double-chain (zigzag) structure. For this geometry we derive a multi-mode generalized Bose-Hubbard model for determining the quantum phases of the gas at the mechanical instability taking into account the quantum fluctuations in all directions of space. Our model limits the dimension of the numerically relevant Hilbert subspace by means of an appropriate decomposition of the field operator, which is obtained from a field theoretical model of the linearzigzag instability. We determine the phase diagrams of small systems using exact diagonalization and find that, even for tight transverse confinement, the aspect ratio between the two transverse trap frequencies controls not only the classical but also the quantum properties of the ground state in a non-trivial way. Convergence tests at the linear-zigzag instability demonstrate that our multi-mode generalized Bose-Hubbard model can catch the essential features of the quantum phases of dipolar gases in confined geometries with a limited computational effort. arXiv:1704.00948v1 [cond-mat.quant-gas]

We study the dynamical depinning following a sudden turn off of an optical lattice for a gas of impenetrable bosons in a tight atomic waveguide. We use a Bose-Fermi mapping to infer the exact quantum dynamical evolution. At long times, in the thermodynamic limit, we observe the approach to a non-equilibrium steady state, characterized by the absence of quasi-long-range order and a reduced visibility in the momentum distribution. Similar features are found in a finite-size system at times corresponding to half the revival time, where we find that the system approaches a quasi-steady state with a power-law behaviour.