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arXiv:1006.2395 · Physical Review B

Two distinct Mott-insulator to Bose-glass transitions and breakdown of self-averaging in the disordered Bose-Hubbard model

Frank Krüger, Seungmin Hong, Philip Phillips

Published Sep 19, 2011• 18 citations
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Abstract

We investigate the instabilities of the Mott-insulating phase of the weakly disordered Bose-Hubbard model within a renormalization group analysis of the replica field theory obtained by a strong-coupling expansion around the atomic limit. We identify an order parameter and associated correlation length scale that are capable of capturing the transition from a state with zero compressibility, the Mott insulator, to one in which the compressibility is finite, the Bose glass. The order parameter is the relative variance of the disorder-induced mass distribution. In the Mott insulator, the relative variance renormalizes to zero, whereas it diverges in the Bose glass. The divergence of the relative variance signals the breakdown of self-averaging. The length scale governing the breakdown of self-averaging is the distance between rare regions. This length scale is finite in the Bose glass but diverges at the transition to the Mott insulator with an exponent of $\ensuremath{\nu}=1/D$ for incommensurate fillings. Likewise, the compressibility vanishes with an exponent of $\ensuremath{\gamma}=4/D\ensuremath{-}1$ at the transition. At commensurate fillings, the transition is controlled by a different fixed point at which both the disorder and interaction vertices are relevant.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.84.115118

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We investigate the instabilities of the Mott-insulating phase of the weakly disordered Bose-Hubbard model within a renormalization group analysis of the replica field theory obtained by a strong-coupling expansion around the atomic limit. We identify an order parameter and associated correlation length scale that are capable of capturing the transition from a state with zero compressibility, the Mott insulator, to one in which the compressibility is finite, the Bose glass. The order parameter is the relative variance of the disorder-induced mass distribution. In the Mott insulator, the relative variance renormalizes to zero, whereas it diverges in the Bose glass. The divergence of the relative variance signals the breakdown of self-averaging. The length scale governing the breakdown of self-averaging is the distance between rare regions. This length scale is finite in the Bose glass but diverges at the transition to the Mott insulator with an exponent of \ensuremathν=1/D\ensuremath{\nu}=1/D\ensuremathν=1/D for incommensurate fillings. Likewise, the compressibility vanishes with an exponent of \ensuremathγ=4/D\ensuremath−1\ensuremath{\gamma}=4/D\ensuremath{-}1\ensuremathγ=4/D\ensuremath−1 at the transition. At commensurate fillings, the transition is controlled by a different fixed point at which both the disorder and interaction vertices are relevant.
We study the square-lattice Bose-Hubbard model with bounded random on-site energies at zero temperature. Starting from a dual representation obtained from a strong-coupling expansion around the atomic limit, we employ a real-space block decimation scheme. This approach is nonperturbative in the disorder and enables us to study the renormalization-group flow of the induced random-mass distribution. In both insulating phases, the Mott insulator and the Bose glass, the average mass diverges, signaling short range superfluid correlations. The relative variance of the mass distribution distinguishes the two phases, renormalizing to zero in the Mott insulator and diverging in the Bose glass. Negative mass values in the tail of the distribution indicate the presence of rare superfluid regions in the Bose glass. The breakdown of self-averaging is evidenced by the divergent relative variance and increasingly non-Gaussian distributions. We determine an explicit phase boundary between the Mott insulator and Bose glass.
We investigate the nature of the Bose glass phase of the disordered Bose-Hubbard model in d>2d>2d>2 and demonstrate the existence of a glass-like replica symmetry breaking (RSB) order parameter in terms of particle number fluctuations. Starting from a strong-coupling expansion around the atomic limit, we study the instability of the Mott insulator towards the formation of a Bose glass. We add some infinitesimal RSB, following the Parisi hierarchical approach in the most general form, and observe its flow under the momentum-shell renormalization group scheme. We find a new fixed point with one-step RSB, corresponding to the transition between the Mott insulator and a Bose glass phase with hitherto unseen RSB. The susceptibility associated to infinitesimal RSB perturbation in the Mott insulator is found to diverge at the transition with an exponent of γ=1/dγ=1/dγ=1/d. Our findings are consistent with the expectation of glassy behavior and the established breakdown of self-averaging. We discuss the possibility of measuring the glass-like order parameter in optical lattice experiments as well as in certain spin systems that are in the same universality class as the Bose-Hubbard model.
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 use renormalization-group theory to examine the quantum phase transitions upon exiting the insulating phase of a disordered, strongly interacting boson system. For weak disorder we find a direct transition from this Mott insulator to the superfluid phase. In d>4d>4d>4 a finite region around the particle-hole symmetric point supports this direct transition, whereas for 2< d<42<~d<42< d<4 perturbative arguments suggest that the direct transition survives only precisely at commensurate filling. For strong disorder the renormalization trajectories pass next to two fixed points, describing a pair of distinct transitions; first from the Mott insulator to the Bose glass, and then from the Bose glass to the superfluid. The latter fixed point possesses statistical particle-hole symmetry and a dynamical exponent zzz, equal to the dimension ddd.
In this thesis, we study three cases of insulating states of matter in terms of the renormalization procedure where the conventional renormalization group scheme is not simply applicable. The first subject is the spectral weight structure of hole-doped Mott insulators. As the mixing between two separate Hubbard bands is dynamically generated, additional charge degrees of freedom is required to give a proper description to the relevant low-energy physics. On this account, we first discuss how the low-energy Hubbard band should be partitioned to account for the extra degrees of freedom. Following the exact integration procedure of the upper Hubbard band, we explicitly demonstrate that the conserved charge cannot be exhausted by counting quasiparticles. In addition, we argue that it is the existence of dynamically generated charge degrees of freedom that gives rise to the coexistence of poles and zeroes in the single-particle Green function. In comparison to the Fermi arc structure, which is intrinsic to cuperate phenomenology, we suggest that the suppression of the spectral weight at the back side of the arc is a consequence of composite excitations, arising from dynamical mixing. The second topic we study is the nature of the transition between two insulating states of matter in a weakly disordered bosonic system. In particular, we investigate the instabilities of the Mott-insulating phase within a renormalization group analysis of the replica field theory obtained by a strong-coupling expansion around the atomic limit. To this end, we identify a new order parameter and associated correlation length scale that are capable of capturing the transition from a state with zero compressibility, the Mott insulator, to another insulating state with finite compressibility, the Bose glass. The order parameter is the relative variance of the disorder-induced mass distribution. From its distinctive behavior on each phase, we find that the divergence of the relative variance in the Bose glass signals the breakdown of self-averaging. Lastly, we also emphasize that the transition at commensurate filling is governed by a different fixed point in the renormalization group flow. The last topic discussed is the thermoelectric properties of the correlated Kondo lattice system at low temperature. Specifically, we explore the periodic Anderson impurity model with spin-orbit interactions, using the slave-particle method. As the thermopower is related to the entropy per carrier, particle-hole asymmetry and a large density of states at the chemical potential make Kondo insulator an ideal platform for thermoelectrics. In this respect, we further explore the possibility to improve the thermoelectric performance by tuning the crystal electric field splitting, the spin-orbit interaction strength, and orbital degeneracy.
The phase diagrams and phase transitions of bosons with short-ranged repulsive interactions moving in periodic and/or random external potentials at zero temperature are investigated with emphasis on the superfluid-insulator transition induced by varying a parameter such as the density. Bosons in periodic potentials (e.g., on a lattice) at T=0 exhibit two types of phases: a superfluid phase and Mott insulating phases characterized by integer (or commensurate) boson densities, by the existence of a gap for particle-hole excitations, and by zero compressibility. Generically, the superfluid onset transition in d dimensions from a Mott insulator to superfluidity is ``ideal,'' or mean field in character, but at special multicritical points with particle-hole symmetry it is in the universality class of the (d+1)-dimensional XY model. In the presence of disorder, a third, ``Bose glass'' phase exists. This phase is insulating because of the localization effects of the randomness and analogous to the Fermi glass phase of interacting fermions in a strongly disordered potential.The Bose glass phase is characterized by a finite compressibility, no gap, but an infinite superfluid susceptibility. In the presence of disorder the transition to superfluidity is argued to occur only from the Bose glass phase, and never directly from the Mott insulator. This zero-temperature superfluid-insulator transition is studied via generalizations of the Josephson scaling relation for the superfluid density at the ordinary \ensuremath{\lambda} transition, highlighting the crucial role of quantum fluctuations. The transition is found to have a dynamic critical exponent z exactly equal to d and correlation length and order-parameter correlation exponents \ensuremath{\nu} and \ensuremath{\eta} which satisfy the bounds \ensuremath{\nu}\ensuremath{\ge}2/d and \ensuremath{\eta}\ensuremath{\le}2-d, respectively. It is argued that the superfluid-insulator transition in the presence of disorder may have an upper critical dimension dc{d}_{c}dc​ which is infinite, but a perturbative renormalization-group calculation wherein the critical exponents have mean-field values for weak disorder above d=4 is also discussed. Many of these conclusions are verified by explicit calculations on a model of one-dimensional bosons in the presence of both random and periodic potentials. The general results are applied to experiments on 4He^{4}\mathrm{He}4He absorbed in porous media such as Vycor. Some measurable properties of the superfluid onset are predicted exactly [e.g., the exponent x relating the \ensuremath{\lambda} transition temperature to the zero-temperature superfluid density is found to be d/2(d-1)], while stringent bounds are placed on others. Analysis of preliminary data is consistent with these predictions.