Radio-frequency driving of an attractive Fermi gas in a one-dimensional optical lattice

We investigate the response to radio-frequency driving of an ultracold gas of attractively interacting fermions in a one-dimensional optical lattice. We study the system dynamics by monitoring the driving-induced population transfer to a third state, and the evolution of the momentum density and pair distributions. Depending on the frequency of the radio-frequency field, two different dynamical regimes emerge when considering the evolution of the third-level population. One regime exhibits (off-)resonant many-body oscillations reminiscent of Rabi oscillations in a discrete two-level system, while the other displays a strong linear rise. Within this second regime, we connect, via linear response theory, the extracted transfer rate to the system single-particle spectral function and infer the nature of the excitations from Bethe ansatz calculations. In addition, we show that this radio-frequency technique can be employed to gain insights into this many-body system coupling mechanism away from equilibrium. This is done by monitoring the momentum density redistributions and the evolution of the pair correlations during the drive. Capturing such nonequilibrium physics goes beyond a linear response treatment and is achieved here by conducting time-dependent matrix-product-state simulations.