Test of Particle-Assisted Tunneling for Strongly Interacting Fermions in an Optical Superlattice

Abstract

Fermions in an optical lattice near a wide Feshbach resonance are expected to be described by an effective Hamiltonian of the general Hubbard model with particle-assisted tunneling rates resulting from the strong atomic interaction [Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 243202 (2005)]. Here, we propose a scheme to unambiguously test the predictions of this effective Hamiltonian through manipulation of ultracold atoms in an inhomogeneous optical superlattice. The structure of the low-energy Hilbert space as well as the particle assisted tunneling rates can be inferred from measurements of the time-of-flight images.