Kilohertz-Driven Bose-Einstein Condensates in Optical Lattices

We analyze time-of-flight absorption images obtained with dilute Bose–Einstein condensates released from shaken optical lattices, both theoretically and experimentally. We argue that weakly interacting, ultracold quantum gases in kilohertz-driven optical potentials constitute equilibrium systems characterized by a steady-state distribution of Floquet-state occupation numbers. Our experimental results consistently indicate that a driven ultracold Bose gas tends to occupy a single Floquet state, just as it occupies a single energy eigenstate when there is no forcing. When the driving amplitude is sufficiently high, the Floquet state possessing the lowest mean energy does not necessarily coincide with the Floquet state connected to the ground state of the undriven system. We observe strongly driven Bose gases to condense into the former state under such conditions, thus providing nontrivial examples of dressed matter waves.