Publication Type
Journal
Journal Name
Physical Review A
Publication Date
Page Number
041603
Volume
80
Issue
4
Abstract
Correlations between particles can lead to subtle and sometimes counterintuitive phenomena. We analyze
one such case, occurring during the sudden expansion of fermions in a lattice when the initial state has a strong
admixture of double occupancies. We promote the notion of quantum distillation: during the expansion and in
the case of strongly repulsive interactions, doublons group together, forming a nearly ideal band insulator,
which is metastable with low entropy. We propose that this effect could be used for cooling purposes in
experiments with two-component Fermi gases.
