Laser assisted tunneling in a Tonks-Girardeau gas

Abstract

We investigate the applicability of laser assisted tunneling in a strongly interacting one-dimensional (1D) Bose gas (the Tonks-Girardeau gas) in optical lattices. We find that the stroboscopic dynamics of the Tonks-Girardeau gas in a continuous Wannier-Stark-ladder potential, supplemented with laser assisted tunneling, effectively realizes the ground state of 1D hard-core bosons in a discrete lattice with nontrivial hopping phases. We compare observables that are affected by the interactions, such as the momentum distribution, natural orbitals and their occupancies, in the time-dependent continuous system, to those of the ground state of the discrete system. Stroboscopically, we find an excellent agreement, indicating that laser assisted tunneling is a viable technique for realizing novel ground states and phases with hard-core 1D Bose gases.