Ramsey interferometers (RIs) using internal electronic or nuclear states find wide applications in science and engineering. We develop a matter wave Ramsey interferometer for motional quantum states exploiting the S-and D-bands of an optical lattice and identify the different de-phasing and de-coherence mechanisms. We implement a band echo technique, employing repeated π-pulses. This suppresses the de-phasing evolution and significantly increase the coherence time of the motional state interferometer by one order of magnitude. We identify thermal fluctuations as the main mechanism for the remaining decay contrast. Our demonstration of an echo-Ramsey interferometer with motional quantum states in an optical lattice has potential application in the study of quantum many body lattice dynamics, and motional qubits manipulation.

Sliding phases have been long sought-after in the context of coupled XY-models, of relevance to various many-body systems such as layered superconductors, free-standing liquid-crystal films, and cationic lipid-DNA complexes. Here we report an observation of a dynamical sliding-phase superfluid that emerges in a nonequilibrium setting from the quantum dynamics of a three-dimensional ultracold atomic gas loaded into the P-band of a one-dimensional optical lattice. A shortcut loading method is used to transfer atoms into the P-band at zero quasi-momentum within a very short time duration. The system can be viewed as a series of "pancake"-shaped atomic samples. For this far-out-of-equilibrium system, we find an intermediate time window with lifetime around tens of milliseconds, where the atomic ensemble exhibits robust superfluid phase coherence in the pancake directions, but no coherence in the lattice direction, which implies a dynamical sliding-phase superfluid. The emergence of the sliding phase is attributed to a mechanism of cross-dimensional energy transfer in our proposed phenomenological theory, which is consistent with experimental measurements. This experiment potentially opens up a novel venue to search for exotic dynamical phases by creating high-band excitations in optical lattices.

We report the long-time nonlinear dynamical evolution of ultracold atomic gases in the P-band of an optical lattice. A Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is fast and efficiently loaded into the Pband at zero quasi-momentum with a non-adiabatic shortcut method. For the first one and half milliseconds, these momentum states undergo oscillations due to coherent superposition of different bands, which are followed by oscillations up to 60ms of a much longer period. Our analysis shows the dephasing from the nonlinear interaction is very conducive to the long-period oscillations induced by the variable force due to the harmonic confinement.

Optical absorption imaging is a basic detection technique for obtaining information from matter waves, in which the absorption signal can be obtained by comparing the recorded detection light field with the light field in the presence of absorption, thereby giving the spatial distribution of the atoms. The noise in detection arises mainly from differences between the two recorded light field distributions, which is difficult to avoid in experiments. In this work, we present an optimized fringe removal algorithm, developing a method to generate an ideal reference light field, avoiding the noise generated by the light field difference, and suppressing the noise signal to the theoretical limit. Using principal component analysis, we explore the optimal calculation area and how to remove noise information from the basis to allow optimal performance and speed. As an example, we consider scattering atomic peaks with a small number of atoms in a triangular lattice. Compared with the conventional processing method, our algorithm can reduce the measured atomic temperature variance by more than three times, giving a more reliable result.

We investigate the mutiphoton process between different Bloch states in an amplitude modulated optical lattice. In the experiment, we perform the modulation with more than one frequency components, which includes a high degree of freedom and provides a flexible way to coherently control quantum states. Based on the study of single frequency modulation, we investigate the collaborative effect of different frequency components in two aspects. Through double frequency modulations, the spectrums of excitation rates for different lattice depths are measured. Moreover, interference between two separated excitation paths is shown, emphasizing the influence of modulation phases when two modulation frequencies are commensurate. Finally, we demonstrate the application of the double frequency modulation to design a large-momentum-transfer beam splitter. The beam splitter is easy in practice and would not introduce phase shift between two arms.