title: Dynamical arrest of ultracold lattice fermions.
abstract: We theoretically investigate the thermodynamics of an interacting inhomogeneous two-component Fermi gas in an optical lattice. Motivated by a recent experiment by L. Hackermüller et al., Science 327, 1621 (2010), we study the effect of the interplay between thermodynamics and strong correlations on the size of the fermionic cloud. We use dynamical mean-field theory to compute the cloud size, which in the experiment shows an anomalous expansion behavior upon increasing attractive interaction. We confirm this qualitative effect but, assuming adiabaticity, we find quantitative agreement only for weak interactions. For strong interactions we observe significant nonequilibrium effects which we attribute to a dynamical arrest of the particles due to increasing correlations.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Theoretische Physik, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, 60438 Frankfurt/Main, Germany.
authors.forename: Bernd
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Schmidt
authors.affiliation: Institut für Theoretische Physik, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, 60438 Frankfurt/Main, Germany and I. Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Hamburg, 20355 Hamburg, Germany.
authors.forename: M Reza
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Bakhtiari
authors.affiliation: Institut für Theoretische Physik, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, 60438 Frankfurt/Main, Germany and I. Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Hamburg, 20355 Hamburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Irakli
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Titvinidze
authors.affiliation: Fakultät für Physik, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, 80799 München, Germany.
authors.forename: Ulrich
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Schneider
authors.affiliation: Institute for Theoretical Physics, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1090 GL Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Michiel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Snoek
authors.affiliation: Institut für Theoretische Physik, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, 60438 Frankfurt/Main, Germany.
authors.forename: Walter
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Hofstetter