Anomalous cooling of bosons by dimensional reduction

Abstract

Cold atomic gases provide a remarkable testbed to study the physics of interacting many-body quantum systems. Temperatures are necessarily nonzero, but cooling to the ultralow temperatures needed for quantum simulation purposes or even simply measuring the temperatures directly on the system can prove to be very challenging tasks. Here, we implement thermometry on strongly interacting two- and one-dimensional Bose gases with high sensitivity in the nanokelvin temperature range. Our method is aided by the fact that the decay of the first-order correlation function is very sensitive to the temperature when interactions are strong. We find that there may be a substantial temperature variation when the three-dimensional quantum gas is cut into two-dimensional slices or into one-dimensional tubes. Notably, the temperature for the one-dimensional case can be much lower than the initial temperature. Our findings show that this decrease results from the interplay of dimensional reduction and strong interactions.