Identifying diffusive length scales in one-dimensional Bose gases

Abstract

In the hydrodynamics of integrable models, diffusion is a subleading correction to ballistic propagation. Here we quantify the diffusive contribution for one-dimensional Bose gases and find it most influential in the crossover between the main thermodynamic regimes of the gas. Analysing the experimentally measured dynamics of a single density mode, we find diffusion to be relevant only for high wavelength excitations. Instead, the observed relaxation is solely caused by a ballistically driven dephasing process, whose time scale is related to the phonon lifetime of the system and is thus useful to evaluate the applicability of the phonon bases typically used in quantum field simulators.