One-Dimensional Bose Gases Out of Equilibrium

We will give an overview of our recent experiments on the quench dynamics and thermalization of isolated quantum systems. In a first experiment we coherently split a one-dimensional Bose gas. The time evolution following this quench leads to the establishment of a quasi-steady prethermalized state which we characterize in detail. Using time-resolved measurements of two-point correlation functions we further show that the strong correlations introduced by the quench decay according to a light-cone-like evolution. In a second series of experiments, we introduce a tunable tunnel coupling between the two gases. This allows us to explore a wide range of quench protocols with time-dependent tunnel couplings.