Quantum walks of interacting Mott-insulator defects with three-body interactions

Abstract

Quantum walks of interacting particles may display non-trivial features due to the interplay between the statistical nature and the many-body interactions associated to them. We analyze the quantum walk of interacting defects on top of an uniform bosonic Mott insulator at unit filling in an one dimensional graph. While the quantum walk of single particle defect shows trivial features, the case of two particles exhibits interesting phenomenon of quantum walk reversal as a function of additional onsite three-body attractive interactions. In the absence of the three-body interaction a quantum walk of pairs of particles is obtained and as the strength of the three-body interaction becomes more and more attractive, the independent particle behavior in quantum walk appears. Interestingly, further increase in the three-body interaction leads to the re-appearance of the quantum walk associated to a pair of particles. This quantum-walk reversal phenomenon is studied using the real-space density evolution, Bloch oscillation as well as two-particle correlation functions.