Non-equilibrium dissipative dynamics and heating of cold atoms in optical lattices

We study the dissipative many-body dynamics of cold atoms in optical lattices induced by heating processes, including spontaneous emissions and noise on the lattice potential. The corresponding heating processes are intrinsically non-equilibrium, and a key aspect of the dynamics is the interplay between the form of the dissipation and the many-body physics of the state present in the system. We discuss how different heating mechanisms will differently affect the characteristic correlation functions of different many-body states, and to what extent states in different parameter regimes are able to thermalise in the presence of dissipation. In 1D we compute the dissipative dynamics from a quantum mechanical master equation numerically by combining time- dependent density matrix renormalization group methods with quantum trajectory techniques.