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arXiv:0807.0446 · Physical Review Letters

Strongly Interacting Bosons in a Disordered Optical Lattice

Matthew White, Matthew Pasienski, David C. McKay, S. Q. Zhou, David M. Ceperley, Brian DeMarco

Published Feb 5, 2009• 229 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We experimentally probe the properties of the disordered Bose-Hubbard model using an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in a 3D disordered optical lattice. Controllable disorder is introduced using a fine-grained optical speckle field with features comparable in size to the lattice spacing along every lattice direction. A precision measurement of the disordering potential is used to compute the single-particle parameters of the system. To constrain theories of the disordered Bose Hubbard model, we have measured the change in condensate fraction as a function of disorder strength for several different ratios of tunneling to interaction energy. We observe disorder-induced, reversible suppression of condensate fraction for superfluid and coexisting superfluid-Mott-insulator phases.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.102.055301

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We experimentally probe the properties of the disordered Bose-Hubbard model using an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in a 3D disordered optical lattice. Controllable disorder is introduced using a fine-grained optical speckle field with features comparable in size to the lattice spacing along every lattice direction. A precision measurement of the disordering potential is used to compute the single-particle parameters of the system. To constrain theories of the disordered Bose Hubbard model, we have measured the change in condensate fraction as a function of disorder strength for several different ratios of tunneling to interaction energy. We observe disorder-induced, reversible suppression of condensate fraction for superfluid and coexisting superfluid-Mott-insulator phases.
We study the weakly disordered Bose-Hubbard model on a cubic lattice through a one-loop renormalization-group analysis of the corresponding effective-field theory which is explicitly derived by combining a strong-coupling expansion with a replica average over the disorder. The method is applied not only to generic uncorrelated on-site disorder but also to simultaneous hopping-disorder correlated with the differences of adjacent disorder potentials. Such correlations are inherent in fine-grained optical speckle potentials used as a source of disorder in optical lattice experiments. As a result of strong coupling, the strength of the replica-mixing disorder vertex, responsible for the emergence of a Bose glass, crucially depends on the chemical potential and the Hubbard repulsion and vanishes to leading order in the disorder at commensurate boson fillings. As a consequence, at such fillings a direct transition between the Mott insulator and the superfluid in the presence of disorder cannot be excluded on the basis of a one-loop calculation. At incommensurate fillings, at a certain length scale, the Mott insulator will eventually become unstable toward the formation of a Bose glass. Phase diagrams as a function of the microscopic parameters are presented and the finite-size crossover between the Mott-insulating state and the Bose glass is analyzed.
We study the equilibrium and nonequilibrium properties of strongly interacting bosons on a lattice in the presence of a random bounded disorder potential. Using a Gutzwiller projected variational technique, we study the equilibrium phase diagram of the disordered Bose-Hubbard model and obtain the Mott insulator, Bose glass, and superfluid phases. We also study the nonequilibrium response of the system under a periodic temporal drive where, starting from the superfluid phase, the hopping parameter is ramped down linearly in time, and back to its initial value. We study the density of excitations created, the change in the superfluid order parameter, and the energy pumped into the system in this process as a function of the inverse ramp rate $\ensuremath{\tau}$. For the clean case the density of excitations goes to a constant, while the order parameter and energy relax as $1/\ensuremath{\tau}$ and $1/{\ensuremath{\tau}}^{2}$ respectively. With disorder, the excitation density decays exponentially with $\ensuremath{\tau}$, with the decay rate increasing with the disorder, to an asymptotic value independent of the disorder. The energy and change in order parameter also decrease as $\ensuremath{\tau}$ is increased.
The study of the disordered Bose-Hubbard model is key to understanding the interplay of disorder and interactions. Despite many studies with uniform diagonal disorder, few have inquired into experimental realizations with an additional correlated off-diagonal disorder. The presence of a trap and finite temperature effects in experiments lead to multiple do- mains of the Superfluid, Mott-Insulator/normal and the Bose-Glass phase. Previous studies using approximate theories produced results that are not in accordance with experiments. Stochastic Series Expansion is a finite temperature technique that can solve Bosonic lattice Hamiltonians exactly for large systems. Here, studies are performed for an extensive range of parameters using disorder distributions that are similar to experiments. Insights are first acquired by studying trap-free situations. Constant density calculations show that, although the qualitative features of the phase diagram remain robust between speckle disorder and uniform box disorder, there are quantitative differences. Studies of the Bose-glass phase ex- plicitly show that it is composed of superfluid puddles that are stable to finite temperature effects for large temperature ranges. Finite temperature behavior of a strongly correlated sys- tem reveals that at unit filling, the transition temperature of the superfluid is increased due to the addition of disorder. Inquires are then extended to discern the properties of trapped systems. Extensive calculations show that domain-like structures that develop can be rig- orously demarcated using the single-particle eigenstates extracted from the single-particle density matrix. Observables are calculated for the system at the single-site and global scales, showing that intermediate length scales provide the correct description of the physics of the domains in these systems. These techniques are used to conclusively show the possibility of the re-entrant superfluid that should be accessible to experiments. The temperature de- pendence of the re-entrant domain is explicitly calculated to be within experimental limits provided interactions are not too large. Comparisons with the local density approximation show reasonable agreement at low disorder strengths. At large disorder strengths there can be quantitative errors and can also result in qualitative errors. The phase diagram due to speckle disorder is presented for a range of values that are readily accessible to experiments. It is quantitatively shown that the effects of off-diagonal disorder are minimal. The superfluid remains unaffected despite large disorder in the tunneling term. Full scale ab initio calcu- lations of the largest trapped disordered systems to date are performed in order to identify the superfluid-Bose-glass phase boundary in collaboration with experiments. Results show remarkable agreement, but there are open questions with regards to the possibility of glassy dynamics.
We investigate the properties of the superfluid phase in the three-dimensional disordered Bose-Hubbard model using quantum Monte Carlo simulations. The phase diagram is generated using Gaussian disorder on the on-site potential. Comparisons with box and speckle disorder show qualitative similarities leading to the reentrant behavior of the superfluid. Quantitative differences that arise are controlled by the specific shape of the disorder. Statistics pertaining to disorder distributions are studied for a range of interaction strengths and system sizes, where strong finite-size effects are observed. Despite this, both the superfluid fraction and compressibility remain self-averaging throughout the superfluid phase. Close to the superfluid--Bose-glass phase boundary, finite-size effects dominate but still suggest that self-averaging holds. Our results are pertinent to experiments with ultracold atomic gases where a systematic disorder averaging procedure is typically not possible.
We present a study of the superfluid properties of atomic Bose gases in optical lattice potentials using the Bose-Hubbard model. To do this, we use a microscopic definition of the superfluid fraction based on the response of the system to a phase variation imposed by means of twisted boundary conditions. We compare the superfluid fraction to other physical quantities, i.e., the interference pattern after ballistic expansion, the quasimomentum distribution, and number fluctuations. We have performed exact numerical calculations of all these quantities for small one-dimensional systems. We show that the superfluid fraction alone exhibits a clear signature of the Mott-insulator transition. Observables like the fringe visibility, which probe only ground-state properties, do not provide direct information on superfluidity and the Mott-insulator transition.