Quantum walks of interacting Mott-insulator defects with three-body interactions
Suman Mondal, Tapan Mishra · Physical Review A · 2020
Quantum walks of interacting particles may display nontrivial features due to the interplay between the statistical nature and the many-body interactions associated with them. We analyze the quantum walk of interacting defects on top of a uniform bosonic Mott insulator at unit filling in a one-dimensional graph. While the quantum walk of a single-particle defect shows trivial features, the case of two particles exhibits the interesting phenomenon of quantum walk reversal as a function of additional on-site three-body attractive interactions. In the absence of a three-body interaction a quantum walk of pairs of particles is obtained, and as the strength of the three-body interaction becomes more and more attractive, independent-particle behavior appears in the quantum walk. Interestingly, further increase in the three-body interaction leads to the reappearance of the quantum walk associated with a pair of particles. This quantum walk reversal phenomenon is studied using the real-space density evolution, Bloch oscillation, and two-particle correlation functions.