TY - JOUR T1 - Many-body dynamics of dipolar molecules in an optical lattice JF - Physical Review Letters Y1 - 2014 A1 - Kaden R. A. Hazzard A1 - Bryce Gadway A1 - Michael Foss-Feig A1 - Bo Yan A1 - Steven A. Moses A1 - Jacob P. Covey A1 - Norman Y. Yao A1 - Mikhail D. Lukin A1 - Jun Ye A1 - Deborah S. Jin A1 - Ana Maria Rey AB - Understanding the many-body dynamics of isolated quantum systems is one of the central challenges in modern physics. To this end, the direct experimental realization of strongly correlated quantum systems allows one to gain insights into the emergence of complex phenomena. Such insights enable the development of theoretical tools that broaden our understanding. Here, we theoretically model and experimentally probe with Ramsey spectroscopy the quantum dynamics of disordered, dipolar-interacting, ultracold molecules in a partially filled optical lattice. We report the capability to control the dipolar interaction strength, and we demonstrate that the many-body dynamics extends well beyond a nearest-neighbor or mean-field picture, and cannot be quantitatively described using previously available theoretical tools. We develop a novel cluster expansion technique and demonstrate that our theoretical method accurately captures the measured dependence of the spin dynamics on molecule number and on the dipolar interaction strength. In the spirit of quantum simulation, this agreement simultaneously benchmarks the new theoretical method and verifies our microscopic understanding of the experiment. Our findings pave the way for numerous applications in quantum information science, metrology, and condensed matter physics. VL - 113 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.2354v1 CP - 19 J1 - Phys. Rev. Lett. U5 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.195302 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Suppressing the loss of ultracold molecules via the continuous quantum Zeno effect JF - Physical Review Letters Y1 - 2014 A1 - Bihui Zhu A1 - Bryce Gadway A1 - Michael Foss-Feig A1 - Johannes Schachenmayer A1 - Michael Wall A1 - Kaden R. A. Hazzard A1 - Bo Yan A1 - Steven A. Moses A1 - Jacob P. Covey A1 - Deborah S. Jin A1 - Jun Ye A1 - Murray Holland A1 - Ana Maria Rey AB - We investigate theoretically the suppression of two-body losses when the on-site loss rate is larger than all other energy scales in a lattice. This work quantitatively explains the recently observed suppression of chemical reactions between two rotational states of fermionic KRb molecules confined in one-dimensional tubes with a weak lattice along the tubes [Yan et al., Nature 501, 521-525 (2013)]. New loss rate measurements performed for different lattice parameters but under controlled initial conditions allow us to show that the loss suppression is a consequence of the combined effects of lattice confinement and the continuous quantum Zeno effect. A key finding, relevant for generic strongly reactive systems, is that while a single-band theory can qualitatively describe the data, a quantitative analysis must include multiband effects. Accounting for these effects reduces the inferred molecule filling fraction by a factor of five. A rate equation can describe much of the data, but to properly reproduce the loss dynamics with a fixed filling fraction for all lattice parameters we develop a mean-field model and benchmark it with numerically exact time-dependent density matrix renormalization group calculations. VL - 112 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.2221v2 CP - 7 J1 - Phys. Rev. Lett. U5 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.070404 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Long-lived dipolar molecules and Feshbach molecules in a 3D optical lattice JF - Physical Review Letters Y1 - 2012 A1 - Amodsen Chotia A1 - Brian Neyenhuis A1 - Steven A. Moses A1 - Bo Yan A1 - Jacob P. Covey A1 - Michael Foss-Feig A1 - Ana Maria Rey A1 - Deborah S. Jin A1 - Jun Ye AB - We have realized long-lived ground-state polar molecules in a 3D optical lattice, with a lifetime of up to 25 s, which is limited only by off-resonant scattering of the trapping light. Starting from a 2D optical lattice, we observe that the lifetime increases dramatically as a small lattice potential is added along the tube-shaped lattice traps. The 3D optical lattice also dramatically increases the lifetime for weakly bound Feshbach molecules. For a pure gas of Feshbach molecules, we observe a lifetime of >20 s in a 3D optical lattice; this represents a 100-fold improvement over previous results. This lifetime is also limited by off-resonant scattering, the rate of which is related to the size of the Feshbach molecule. Individually trapped Feshbach molecules in the 3D lattice can be converted to pairs of K and Rb atoms and back with nearly 100% efficiency. VL - 108 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.4420v1 CP - 8 J1 - Phys. Rev. Lett. U5 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.080405 ER -