Trap-modulation spectroscopy of the Mott-insulator transition in optical lattices

We discuss a technique to probe the properties of an interacting cold atomic gas that can be viewed as a dynamical compressibility measurement. We apply this technique to the study of the superfluid-to-Mott-insulator quantum phase transition in one and three dimensions for a bosonic gas trapped in an optical lattice. Excitations of the system are detected by time-of-flight measurements. The experimental data for the one-dimensional case are in good agreement with the results of a time-dependent density-matrix-renormalization- group calculation. © 2009 The American Physical Society.