Resonantly enhanced tunneling and transport of ultracold atoms on tilted optical lattices

We investigate the resonantly enhanced tunneling dynamics of ultracold bosons loaded on a tilted one-dimensional optical lattice, which can be used to simulate a chain of Ising spins and associated quantum phase transitions. The center-of-mass motion after a sudden tilt both at commensurate and incommensurate fillings is obtained via analytic, time-dependent exact diagonalization and density-matrix renormalization-group methods. We identify a maximum in the amplitude of the center-of-mass oscillations at the quantum critical point of the effective spin system. For the dynamics of incommensurate systems, which cannot be mapped to a spin model, we develop an analytical approach in which the time evolution is obtained by projecting onto resonant families of small clusters. We compare the results of this approach at low fillings to the exact time evolution and find good agreement even at filling factors as large as 2/3. Using this projection onto small clusters, we propose a controllable transport scheme applicable in the context of Atomtronic devices on optical lattices (slinky scheme).