Out-of-equilibrium dynamics of Bose-Bose mixtures in optical lattices

Abstract

We examine the quench dynamics across quantum phase transitions from a Mott insulator (MI) to a superfluid (SF) phase in a two-component bosonic mixture in an optical lattice. We show that two-component Bose mixtures exhibit qualitatively different quantum dynamics than one-component Bose gas. Besides second-order MI-SF transitions, we also investigate quench dynamics across a first-order MI-SF transition. The Bose mixtures show the critical slowing down of dynamics near the critical transition point, as proposed by the Kibble-Zurek mechanism. For MI-SF transitions with homogeneous lattice-site distributions in the MI phase, the dynamical critical exponents extracted by the power-law scaling of the proposed quantities obtained via numerical simulations are in very close agreement with the mean-field predictions.