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arXiv:0711.0029 · Physical Review A

Superfluid and Mott-insulating shells of bosons in harmonically confined optical lattices

Kaushik Mitra, Carl J. Williams, C. A. R. Sá de Melo

Published Mar 6, 2008• 21 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We describe weakly interacting atomic or molecular bosons trapped in harmonically confined optical lattices, which exhibit a wedding cake structure consisting of insulating (Mott) shells. We show that superfluid regions emerge between Mott shells as a result of fluctuations due to finite hopping and find that the order parameter equation in the superfluid regions is not of the standard Gross-Pitaevskii type except near the insulator-to-superfluid boundaries. We obtain the excitation spectra in the Mott and superfluid regions, and we show that the superfluid shells possess low-energy sound modes with spatially dependent sound velocity described by a local index of refraction directly related to the local superfluid density. Furthermore, we discuss the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition and vortex-antivortex pairs in thin (wide) superfluid shells (rings) limited by three- (two-) dimensional Mott regions. Last, we propose an experiment to detect superfluid shells using Laguerre-Gaussian beams and Bragg spectroscopy.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.77.033607

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We describe weakly interacting atomic or molecular bosons trapped in harmonically confined optical lattices, which exhibit a wedding cake structure consisting of insulating (Mott) shells. We show that superfluid regions emerge between Mott shells as a result of fluctuations due to finite hopping and find that the order parameter equation in the superfluid regions is not of the standard Gross-Pitaevskii type except near the insulator-to-superfluid boundaries. We obtain the excitation spectra in the Mott and superfluid regions, and we show that the superfluid shells possess low-energy sound modes with spatially dependent sound velocity described by a local index of refraction directly related to the local superfluid density. Furthermore, we discuss the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition and vortex-antivortex pairs in thin (wide) superfluid shells (rings) limited by three- (two-) dimensional Mott regions. Last, we propose an experiment to detect superfluid shells using Laguerre-Gaussian beams and Bragg spectroscopy.
Atomic or molecular bosons in harmonically confined optical lattices exhibit a wedding cake structure consisting of insulating (Mott) shells. It is shown that superfluid regions emerge between Mott shells as a result of fluctuations due to finite hopping. It is found that the order parameter equation in the superfluid region is not of the Gross-Pitaeviskii type except near the insulator to superfluid boundaries. The excitation spectra in the Mott and superfluid regions are obtained, and it is shown that the superfluid shells posses low energy sound modes with spatially dependent sound velocity described by a local index of refraction directly related to the local superfluid density. Lastly, the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition and vortex-antivortex pairs are discussed in thin (wide) superfluid shells (rings) limited by three (two) dimensional Mott regions.
We describe interacting mixtures of ultracold bosonic and fermionic atoms in harmonically confined optical lattices. For a suitable choice of parameters we study the emergence of superfluid and Fermi-liquid (noninsulating) regions out of Bose-Mott and Fermi-band insulators due to finite boson and fermion hoppings. We obtain the shell structure for the system and show that angular momentum can be transferred to the noninsulating regions from Laguerre-Gaussian beams, which combined with Bragg spectroscopy can reveal all superfluid and Fermi-liquid shells.
We study Bragg spectroscopy of strongly interacting one-dimensional bosons loaded in an optical lattice plus an additional parabolic potential. We calculate the dynamic structure factor by using Monte Carlo simulations for the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian, exact diagonalizations and the results of a recently introduced extended fermionization model. We find that, due to the system's inhomogeneity, the excitation spectrum exhibits a multibranched structure, whose origin is related to the presence of superfluid regions with different densities in the atomic distribution. We thus suggest that Bragg spectroscopy in the linear regime can be used as an experimental tool to unveil the shell structure of alternating Mott insulator and superfluid phases characteristic of trapped bosons.
Recent experiments on strongly interacting bosons in optical lattices have revealed the coexistence of spatially separated Mott-insulating and number-fluctuating phases. We explore the condensate properties of the number fluctuating phase trapped between the Mott-insulating regions and derive the associated collective-mode structure. We discuss the crossover of the interlayer properties between two- and three-dimensional behavior as a function of the lattice parameters and estimate the critical temperatures for the transition from the normal to superfluid state.
Harmonically trapped lattice bosons with strong repulsive interactions exhibit a superfluid-Mott-insulator heterostructure in the form of a ``wedding cake.'' We discuss the mesoscopic aspects of such a system within a one-dimensional scattering matrix approach and calculate the scattering properties of quasiparticles at a superfluid-Mott-insulator interface as an elementary building block to describe transport phenomena across such a boundary. We apply the formalism to determine the heat conductivity through a Mott layer, a quantity relevant to describe thermalization processes in the optical lattice setup. We identify a critical hopping below which the heat conductivity is strongly suppressed.
We study the boundary nature of trapped bosonic Mott insulators in optical square lattices, by performing quantum Monte Carlo simulation. We show that a finite superfluid density generally emerges in the incommensurate-filling (IC) boundary region around the bulk Mott state, irrespectively of the width of the IC region. Both off-diagonal and density correlation functions in the IC boundary region exhibit a nearly power-law decay. The power-law behavior and superfluidity are well developed below a characteristic temperature. These results indicate that a gapless boundary mode always emerges in any atomic Mott insulators on optical lattices. This further implies that if we consider a topological insulating state in Bose or Fermi atomic systems, its boundary possesses at least two gapless modes (or coupled modes) of an above IC edge state and the intrinsic topologically-protected edge state.