Bloch oscillations in one-dimensional spinor gas

Abstract

A force applied to a spin-flipped particle in a one-dimensional spinor gas may lead to Bloch oscillations of particle's position and velocity. The existence of Bloch oscillations crucially depends on the viscous friction force exerted by the rest of the gas on the spin excitation. We evaluate the friction in terms of the quantum fluid parameters. In particular, we show that the friction is absent for integrable cases, such as SU(2) symmetric gas of bosons or fermions. For small deviations from the exact integrability the friction is very weak, opening the possibility to observe Bloch oscillations.