New Phenomena in Driven Quantum Systems

The isolated, clean, and tunable nature of ultracold gases make them a natural platform for controlled realization and study of Floquet physics and driven quantum systems. I will present recent results from the Weld group discussing three experiments along these lines. First I will discuss an ultracold strontium experiment in which weak driving of a bichromatic lattice is used to probe novel excitation spectra in quasiperiodic systems. I will then talk about ultracold lithium in strongly modulated optical lattices, including the mapping of a Floquet phase diagram and exploration of a Floquet prethermal state. Finally, I will present results from a new type of quantum simulator in which a driven Bose condensate of strontium emulates ultrafast ionization dynamics in attosecond laser pulses, counter-intuitively enabling the study of some of the fastest processes in atomic physics with some of the slowest.