Ballistic quench-induced correlation waves in ultracold gases

Abstract

We investigate the wave packet dynamics of a pair of particles that undergoes a rapid change of scattering length. The short-range interactions are modeled in the zero-range limit, where the quench is accomplished by switching the boundary condition of the wave function at vanishing particle separation. This generates a correlation wave that propagates rapidly to nonzero particle separations. We have derived universal, analytic results for this process that lead to a simple phase-space picture of the quench-induced scattering. Intuitively, the strength of the correlation wave relates to the initial contact of the system. We find that, in one spatial dimension, the $k^{-4}$ tail of the momentum distribution contains a ballistic contribution that does not originate from short-range pair correlations, and a similar conclusion can hold in other dimensionalities depending on the quench protocol. We examine the resultant quench-induced transport in an optical lattice in 1D, and a semiclassical treatment is found to give quantitatively accurate estimates for the transport probabilities.