Expansion dynamics in two-dimensional Bose-Hubbard lattices: Bose-Einstein condensate and thermal cloud

Abstract: We study the temporal expansion of an ultracold Bose gas in two-dimensional, square optical lattices. The gas is described by the Bose-Hubbard model deep in the superfluid regime, with initially all bosons condensed in the central site of the lattice. We use the previously developed nonequilibrium propagator method for capturing the time evolution of an interacting bosonic system, where the many-body Hamiltonian is represented in an appropriate local basis and the corresponding field operators are separated into the classical [Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC)] part and quantum mechanical fluctuations. After a quench, i.e. after a sudden switch of the lattice nearest-neighbor hopping, the expanding, bosonic cloud separates spatially into a fast, ballistic forerunner and a slowly expanding central part controlled by selftrapping. We show that the forerunner expansion is driven by the coherent dynamics of the BEC and that its velocity is consistent with the Lieb-Robinson bound. For smaller lattices we analyze how quasiparticle collisions lead to enhanced condensate depletion and oscillation damping.