For strong interactions, we find evidence for an emergent incompressible Mott insulating phase.

Transport properties are among the defining characteristics of many important phases in condensed matter physics. In the presence of strong correlations they are difficult to predict even for model systems like the Hubbard model. In real materials they are in general obscured by additional complications including impurities, lattice defects or multi-band effects. Ultracold atoms in contrast offer the possibility to study transport and out-of-equilibrium phenomena in a clean and well-controlled environment and can therefore act as a quantum simulator for condensed matter systems. Here we studied the expansion of an initially confined fermionic quantum gas in the lowest band of a homogeneous optical lattice. While we observe ballistic transport for non-interacting atoms, even small interactions render the expansion almost bimodal with a dramatically reduced expansion velocity. The dynamics is independent of the sign of the interaction, revealing a novel, dynamic symmetry of the Hubbard model.In solid state physics, transport properties are among the key observables, the most prominent example being the electrical conductivity, which e.g. allows to distinguish normal conductors from insulators or superconductors. Furthermore, many of today's most intriguing solid state phenomena manifest themselves in transport properties, examples including high-temperature superconductivity, giant magnetoresistance, quantum hall physics, topological insulators and disorder phenomena. Especially in strongly correlated systems, where the interactions between the conductance electrons are important, transport properties are difficult to calculate beyond the linear response regime. In general, predicting out-of-equilibrium fermionic dynamics represents an even harder problem than the prediction of static properties like the nature of the ground state. In real solids further complications arise due to the effects of e.g. impurities, lattice defects and phonons. These complications render an experimental investigation in a clean and well controlled ultracold atom system highly desirable. While the last years have seen dramatic progress in the control of quantum gases in optical lattices [1-3], a thorough understanding of the dynamics in these systems is still lacking. Genuine dynamical experiments can not only uncover new dynamic phenomena but are also essential to gain insight into the timescales needed to achieve equilibrium in the lattice [4,5] or to adiabatically load into the lattice [6,7].Using both bosonic and fermionic [8-10] atoms, it has become possible to simulate models of strongly interacting quantum particles, for which the Hubbard model [11] * ulrich.schneider@lmu.de is probably the most important example. A major advantage of these systems compared to real solids is the possibility to change all relevant parameters in real-time by e.g. varying laser intensities or magnetic fields. While first studies of dynamical properties of both bosonic and fermionic quantum gases [12][13][14] have already been performed, a remaining...

Interactions lie at the heart of correlated many-body quantum phases. Typically, the interactions between microscopic particles are described as two-body interactions. However, it has been shown that higher-order multi-body interactions could give rise to novel quantum phases with intriguing properties. So far, multi-body interactions have been observed as inelastic loss resonances in three- and four-body recombinations of atom-atom and atom-molecule collisions. Here we demonstrate the presence of effective multi-body interactions in a system of ultracold bosonic atoms in a three-dimensional optical lattice, emerging through virtual transitions of particles from the lowest energy band to higher energy bands. We observe such interactions up to the six-body case in time-resolved traces of quantum phase revivals, using an atom interferometric technique that allows us to precisely measure the absolute energies of atom number states at a lattice site. In addition, we show that the spectral content of these time traces can reveal the atom number statistics at a lattice site, similar to foundational experiments in cavity quantum electrodynamics that yield the statistics of a cavity photon field. Our precision measurement of multi-body interaction energies provides crucial input for the comparison of optical-lattice quantum simulators with many-body quantum theory.

Solvents have a profound influence on chemical reactions in solution and have long been used to control their outcome. Such effects are generally considered to be governed by thermodynamics; however, little is known about the steric effects of solvent molecules. Here, we probe the influence of individual solvent molecules on reaction dynamics and present results on the atomistic dynamics of a microsolvated chemical reaction--the fundamentally important nucleophilic substitution reaction. We study the reaction of OH(-) with CH(3)I using a technique that combines crossed-beam imaging with a cold source of microsolvated reactants. Our results reveal several distinct reaction mechanisms for different degrees of solvation; surprisingly, the classical co-linear substitution mechanism only dominates the dynamics for mono-solvated reactants. We analyse the relative importance of the different mechanisms using ab initio calculations and show that the steric characteristics are at least as relevant as the energetics in understanding the influence of solvent molecules in such microsolvated reactions.

We have experimentally studied few-body impurity systems consisting of a single fermionic atom and a small bosonic field on the sites of an optical lattice. Quantum phase revival spectroscopy has allowed us to accurately measure the absolute strength of Bose-Fermi interactions as a function of the interspecies scattering length. Furthermore, we observe the modification of Bose-Bose interactions that is induced by the interacting fermion. Because of an interference between Bose-Bose and Bose-Fermi phase dynamics, we can infer the mean fermionic filling of the mixture and quantify its increase (decrease) when the lattice is loaded with attractive (repulsive) interspecies interactions.

We demonstrate quantum control over both internal and external quantum degrees of freedom in a high number of identical "chemical reactions," carried out in an array of microtraps in a 3D optical lattice. Starting from a Mott insulating phase of an ultracold atomic quantum gas, we use two-photon Raman transitions to create molecules on lattice sites occupied by two atoms. In the atom-molecule conversion process, we can control both the internal rovibronic and external center of mass quantum state of the molecules. The lattice isolates the microscopic chemical reactions from each other, thereby allowing photoassociation spectra without collisional broadening even at high densities of up to 2 x 10(15) cm(-3).

We present a scheme to embed molecular anions in a gas of ultracold rubidium atoms as a route towards the preparation of cold molecular ions by collisional cooling with ultracold atoms. Associative detachment as an important loss process in collisions between OH- molecules and rubidium atoms is studied. The density distribution of trapped negative ions in the multipole radiofrequency trap is measured by photodetachment tomography, which allows us to derive absolute rate coefficients for the process. We define a regime where translational and internal cooling of molecular ions embedded into the ultracold atomic cloud can be achieved

Strong correlations can dramatically modify the thermodynamics of a quantum many-particle system. Especially intriguing behaviour can appear when the system adiabatically enters a strongly correlated regime, for the interplay between entropy and strong interactions can lead to counterintuitive effects. A well known example is the so-called Pomeranchuk effect, occurring when liquid 3 He is adiabatically compressed towards its crystalline phase. Here, we report on a novel anomalous, isentropic effect in a spin mixture of attractively interacting fermionic atoms in an optical lattice. As we adiabatically increase the attraction between the atoms we observe that the gas, instead of contracting, anomalously expands. This expansion results from the combination of two effects induced by pair formation in a lattice potential: the suppression of quantum fluctuations as the attraction increases, which leads to a dominant role of entropy, and the progressive loss of the spin degree of freedom, which forces the gas to excite additional orbital degrees of freedom and expand to outer regions of the trap in order to maintain the entropy. The unexpected thermodynamics we observe reveal fundamentally distinctive features of pairing in the fermionic Hubbard model. A. IntroductionThe striking consequences of strong correlations in many-body quantum systems are at the frontier of current research. Typically, interest is devoted to the unusual properties of ground states or low-lying excitations, which range from exotic types of order to unconventional quasiparticle statistics [1,2]. But strong correlations can also severely alter the thermodynamics of a quantum system, leading to fascinating finite temperature effects. Especially surprising behaviour can arise when the system adiabatically enters a strongly correlated phase, as the emerging correlations can imply a substantial redistribution of entropy.A well known example of this type of phenomena is the so-called Pomeranchuk effect [3,4], which occurs in the liquid to solid transition of 3 He. Since the solid, through its randomly oriented spins, is more disordered than the liquid, it turns out that when the liquid is adiabatically squeezed, it freezes into a solid by, astoundingly, absorbing heat.Other examples of anomalous behaviour due to the combination of finite entropy and strong correlations have been rarely observed in nature, usually because interactions in typical strongly correlated systems can hardly be tuned. Recently, the extraordinary progress in the control and manipulation of neutral atoms in optical lattices [5,6,7] has added a valuable degree of freedom to the investigation of strongly correlated systems. By varying a collection of parameters, like the scattering length, the lattice depth or the external confinement, it is possible to adiabatically bring a non-interacting gas of bosonic [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18] or fermionic atoms [19,20,21,22] into a regime of strong correlations. Here, we report on the experimental observation and the theoretical predi...