Quantum Measurement-induced Dynamics of Many-Body Ultracold Bosonic and Fermionic Systems in Optical Lattices

Abstract: Trapping ultracold atoms in optical lattices enabled numerous breakthroughs uniting several disciplines. Coupling these systems to quantized light leads to a plethora of new phenomena and has opened up a new field of study. Here we introduce a physically novel source of competition in a many-body strongly correlated system: We prove that quantum backaction of global measurement is able to efficiently compete with intrinsic short-range dynamics of an atomic system. The competition becomes possible due to the ability to change the spatial profile of a global measurement at a microscopic scale comparable to the lattice period without the need of single site addressing. In coherence with a general physical concept, where new competitions typically lead to new phenomena, we demonstrate novel nontrivial dynamical effects such as large-scale multimode oscillations, long-range entanglement and correlated tunneling, as well as selective suppression and enhancement of dynamical processes beyond the projective limit of the quantum Zeno effect. We demonstrate both the break-up and protection of strongly interacting fermion pairs by measurement. Such a quantum optical approach introduces into many-body physics novel processes, objects, and methods of quantum engineering, including the design of many-body entangled environments for open systems.