Generalized Hydrodynamics on an Atom Chip

The emergence of a special type of fluidlike behavior at large scales in one-dimensional (1D) quantum integrable systems, theoretically predicted in O. A. Castro-Alvaredo et al., Emergent Hydrodynamics in Integrable Quantum Systems Out of Equilibrium, Phys. Rev. X 6, 041065 (2016)10.1103/PhysRevX.6.041065 and B. Bertini et al., Transport in Out-of-Equilibrium XXZ Chains: Exact Profiles of Charges and Currents, Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 207201 (2016)10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.207201, is established experimentally, by monitoring the time evolution of the in situ density profile of a single 1D cloud of ^{87}Rb atoms trapped on an atom chip after a quench of the longitudinal trapping potential. The theory can be viewed as a dynamical extension of the thermodynamics of Yang and Yang, and applies to the whole range of repulsive interaction strength and temperature of the gas. The measurements, performed on weakly interacting atomic clouds that lie at the crossover between the quasicondensate and the ideal Bose gas regimes, are in very good agreement with the theory. This contrasts with the previously existing "conventional" hydrodynamic approach-that relies on the assumption of local thermal equilibrium-which is unable to reproduce the experimental data.