Inducing Transport in a Dissipation-Free Lattice with Super Bloch Oscillations

Abstract

Particles in a perfect lattice potential perform Bloch oscillations when subject to a constant force, leading to localization and preventing conductivity. For a weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate of Cs atoms, we observe giant center-of-mass oscillations in position space with a displacement across hundreds of lattice sites when we add a periodic modulation to the force near the Bloch frequency. We study the dependence of these ``super'' Bloch oscillations on lattice depth, modulation amplitude, and modulation frequency and show that they provide a means to induce linear transport in a dissipation-free lattice.