Dissociation dynamics of resonantly coupled Bose-Fermi mixtures in an optical lattice

We consider the photodissociation of ground-state bosonic molecules trapped in an optical lattice potential into a two-component gas of fermionic atoms. The system is assumed to be described by a single-band resonantly coupled Bose-Fermi Hubbard model. We show that in the strong fermion-fermion interaction limit the dissociation dynamics is governed by a spin-boson lattice Hamiltonian. In the framework of a mean-field analysis based on a generalized Gutzwiller ansatz, we then examine the crossover of the dissociation from a regime of independent single-site dynamics to a regime of cooperative dynamics as the molecular tunneling increases. We also show that in the limits of weak and strong intersite tunneling the mean-field solutions agree well with the results from the quantum optical Jaynes-Cummings and Tavis-Cummings models, respectively. Finally, we identify two types of self-trapping transitions, a coherent and an incoherent one, depending on the ratio of the repulsive molecule-molecule interaction strength to molecular tunneling.