I report on recent experiments at NIST on a novel 1-dimensional, strongly interacting Bose gas created by confining a Bose-Einstein Condensate in an optical lattice potential. This is an exciting new technique for exploring the physics of low-dimensional correlated systems. We can adjust in real time nearly all parameters of interest, including atom-atom interactions and externally applied potentials, and here we use this flexibility to reversibly transport the Bose gas across the zero-temperature quantum phase transition from superfluid to Mott-insulator. We observe changes in the correlation of the system through trap-loss, excitation spectroscopy, and matter-wave interference experiments. The hallmark of the Mott-insulator should be a suppression of transport, and we find surprisingly strong damping of collective modes in the presence of extremely weak optical lattice potentials. The low temperatures in this system (<500 nK) mean the timescales of relaxation dynamics in the quantum critical regime are experimentally accessible. Directions for future research are suggested.

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