The 237th R-CCS Cafe - part 1

Recent experimental advances of ultracold gases in optical lattices enable one to realize a highly-controlled quantum simulator of an open quantum many-body system with controllable dissipation.An experimental group has recently observed the continuous quantum Zeno effect in the dynamics of a dissipative Bose-Hubbard system with two-body iosses in three dimensions, in which the parameters are swept from a Mott insulating region to a superfluid one. To theoretically evaluate outcomes taken from this quantum simulation experiment, one needs to develop a numerical method for solving a quantum-mechanical time evolution equation for many-body states subjected to the dissipation of losses. However, this is generally a hard problem due to the exponential increase of the Hilbert space dimension with the number of relevant degrees of freedom. In this work, towards establishing an efficient numerical tool to describe the continuous quantum Zeno effect, we develop a semiclassical truncated Wigner approximation (TWA) method for solving the Lindblad master equation for a strongly interacting Bose gas in an optical lattice. In this talk, I will present a brief overview of the background and some results obtained thus far.