For nearly three decades ultracold atomic gases have been used with great success to study fundamental many-body phenomena such as Bose-Einstein condensation and superfluidity. While traditionally they were produced in harmonic electromagnetic traps and thus had inhomogeneous densities, it is now also possible to create homogeneous samples in the uniform potential of an optical box trap [1]. Box trapping simplifies the interpretation of experimental results, provides more direct connections with theory and, in some cases, allows qualitatively new, hitherto impossible experiments. I will give an overview of our recent experiments with box-trapped three- and two-dimensional Bose gases, focusing on a series of related experiments on far-from-equilibrium phenomena, including turbulence [2-4] and dynamic scaling in driven disordered gases [5].
[1] Quantum gases in optical boxes (review), N. Navon, R. P. Smith, and Z. Hadzibabic, Nat. Phys. 17, 1334 (2021).
[2] Emergence of a turbulent cascade in a quantum gas, N. Navon, A. L. Gaunt, R. P. Smith, and Z. Hadzibabic, Nature 539, 72 (2016).
[3] Emergence of isotropy and dynamic scaling in 2D wave turbulence in a homogeneous Bose gas, M. Galka et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 190402 (2022).
[4] Universal equation of state for wave turbulence in a quantum gas, L. Dogra et al., arXiv:2212.08652
[5] Observation of subdiffusive dynamic scaling in a driven and disordered box-trapped Bose gas, G. Martirosyan et al., arXiv:2304.06697