Abstract

Coherent control of tunneling between potential wells by strong driving has been investigated extensively in the theoretical literature over the past twenty years. In particular, adding a sinusoidally varying linear potential to a double-well potential [1] or to a periodic potential [2] has been predicted to lead to a complete suppression of tunneling for particular values of the ratio K/ω, where K is the (peak) potential gradient and ω is the driving frequency. For the case of a periodic potential, it was shown in [2] that the tunneling parameter J (which describes the energy due to hopping between wells in the Bose-Hubbard model valid for a tight-binding potential) is renormalized by the zeroth-order Bessel function ${\mathcal{J}}_0(K/\omega )$ so that the effective tunneling parameter $J_{\text{e}}{}_{\text{ff}}(K/\omega )={\mathcal{J}}_0(K/\omega )J$ goes to zero at the roots of the Bessel function. We have now verified this prediction experimentally using Bose-Einstein condensates in optical lattices.

© 2007 IEEE