From Fermi's golden rule to Rabi oscillations: Dynamical unbinding transition in a Mott insulator

Fabian Hassler

Leiden University, Instituut Lorentz, Leiden, Netherlands

We study the double occupancy in a fermionic Mott insulator at half-filling generated via a dynamical periodic modulation of the hopping amplitude. Tuning the modulation amplitude, we describe a crossover in the nature of doublon-holon excitations from a Fermi Golden Rule regime to damped Rabi oscillations. The decay time of excited states diverges at a critical modulation strength, signaling the transition to a dynamically bound non-equilibrium state of doublon-holon pairs. A setup using a fermionic quantum gas should allow to study the critical exponents.

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