We study the ``tilting'' of Mott insulators of bosons into metastable states. These are described by Hamiltonians acting on resonant subspaces and have rich possibilities for correlated phases with nontrivial entanglement of pseudospin degrees of freedom encoded in the boson density. We extend a previous study [S. Sachdev, K. Sengupta, and S. M. Girvin, Phys. Rev. B 66, 075128 (2002)] of cubic lattices to a variety of lattices and tilt directions in two dimensions: square, decorated square, triangular, and kagome. For certain configurations three-body interactions are necessary to ensure that the energy of the effective resonant subspace is bounded from below. We find quantum phases with Ising density wave order and with superfluidity transverse to the tilt direction, and a quantum liquid state with no broken symmetry. The existence of the quantum liquid state is shown by an exact solution for a particular correlated boson model. We also find cases for which the resonant subspace is described by effective quantum dimer models.
In this thesis we theoretically study low-dimensional, strongly corrleated systems of cold atoms, which are not in an equilibrium situation. This is motivated by recent experimental progress, which has made it possible to study quantum many-body physics in a controllable and clean setting; and parameters can be changed during the experiment. In Chapter 2 and 3 we study phases and quantum phase transitions of ‘tilted ’ Mott insulator of bosons. We analyze a variety of lattices and tilt directions in two dimensions: square, decorated square, triangular, and kagome. We show that there are rich possibilities for correlated phases with non-trivial entanglement of pseudospin degrees of freedom encoded in the boson density. For certain configurations three-body interactions are necessary to ensure that the energy of the effective resonant subspace is bounded from below. We find quantum phases with Ising density wave order, with superfluidity transverse to the tilt direction, a quantum liquid state with no broken symmetry. We also find cases for which the resonant subspace is described by effective quantum dimer models. In Chapter 4 we study spin 1/2 chains with a Heisenberg interaction which are
We study spinless bosons in a decorated square lattice with a near-diagonal tilt. The resonant subspace of the tilted Mott insulator is described by an effective Hamiltonian of frustrated quantum Ising spins on a nonbipartite lattice. This generalizes an earlier proposal for the unfrustrated quantum Ising model in one dimension which was realized in a recent experiment on ultracold
87Rb atoms in an optical lattice. Very close to diagonal tilt, we find a quantum liquid state which is continuously connected to the paramagnet. Frustration can be reduced by increasing the tilt angle away from the diagonal, and the system undergoes a transition to an antiferromagnetically ordered state. Using quantum Monte Carlo simulations and exact diagonalization, we find that for realistic system sizes the antiferromagnetic order appears to be quasi-one-dimensional, however, in the thermodynamic limit the order is two-dimensional.
We report on a phenomenological study of superfluid to Mott insulator transitions of bosons on the triangular lattice, focusing primarily on the interplay between Mott localization and geometrical charge frustration at
1∕2-filling. A general dual-vortex field theory is developed for arbitrary rational filling factors
f, based on the appropriate projective symmetry group. At the simple nonfrustrated density
f=1∕3, we uncover an example of a deconfined quantum critical point very similar to that found on the half-filled square lattice. Turning to
f=1∕2, the behavior is quite different. Here, we find that the low-energy action describing the Mott transition has an emergent non-Abelian $SU(2)\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}U(1)$ symmetry, which is not present at the microscopic level. This large non-Abelian symmetry is directly related to the frustration-induced quasidegeneracy between many charge-ordered states not related by microscopic symmetries. Through this ``pseudospin''
SU(2) symmetry, the charged excitations in the insulator close to the Mott transition develop a Skyrmion-like character. This leads to an understanding of the supersolid phase of the triangular lattice
XXZ model as a ``partially melted'' Mott insulator, for more information see Melko et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 127207 (2005)], Heidarian and Damle [Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 127206 (2005)], and Wessel and Troyer [Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 127205 (2005)]. The latter picture naturally explains a number of puzzling numerical observations of the properties of this supersolid. Moreover, we predict that the nearby quantum phase transition from this supersolid to the Mott insulator is in the noncompact
CP1 critical universality class as presented in Motrunich and Vishwanath [Phys. Rev. B. 70, 075104 (2004)]. A description of a broad range of other Mott and supersolid states, and a diverse set of quantum critical points between them, is also provided.
Coulomb repulsion between electrons moving on a frustrated lattice can give rise, at simple commensurate electronic densities, to exotic insulating phases of matter. Such a phenomenon is illustrated using an extended $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}J$ model on a planar pyrochlore lattice for which the work on the quarter-filled case [D. Poilblanc et al., Phys. Rev. B 75, 220503 (2007)] is complemented and extended to
1∕8 and
3∕8 fillings. The location of the metal-insulator transition as a function of the Coulomb repulsion is shown to depend strongly on the sign of the hopping. Quite generally, the metal-insulator transition is characterized by lattice symmetry breaking but the nature of the insulating Mott state is more complex than a simple charge density wave. Indeed, in the limit of large Coulomb repulsion, the physics can be described in the framework of (extended) quantum fully packed loop or dimer models carrying extra spin degrees of freedom. Various diagonal and off-diagonal plaquette correlation functions are computed and the low-energy spectra are analyzed in detail in order to characterize the nature of the insulating phases. We provide evidence that, as for an electronic density of
n=1∕2 (quarter filling), the system at
n=1∕4 or
n=3∕4 exhibits also plaquette order by forming a (lattice rotationally invariant) resonant singlet pair crystal, although with a quadrupling of the lattice unit cell (instead of a doubling for
n=1∕2) and a fourfold degenerate ground state. Interestingly, qualitative differences with the bosonic analog (e.g., known to exhibit columnar order at
n=1∕4) emphasize the important role of the spin degrees of freedom in, e.g., stabilizing plaquette phases with respect to rotational symmetry-breaking phases.
We study the superfluid and insulating phases of interacting bosons on the triangular lattice with an inverted dispersion, corresponding to frustrated hopping between sites. The resulting single-particle dispersion has multiple minima at nonzero wave vectors in momentum space, in contrast to the unique zero-wave-vector minimum of the unfrustrated problem. As a consequence, the superfluid phase is unstable against developing additional chiral order that breaks time-reversal (
T) and parity (
P) symmetries by forming a condensate at nonzero wave vector. We demonstrate that the loss of superfluidity can lead to an even more exotic phase, the chiral Mott insulator, with nontrivial current order that breaks
T,P. These results are obtained via variational estimates, as well as a combination of bosonization and density-matrix renormalization group of triangular ladders, which, taken together, permit a fairly complete characterization of the phase diagram. We discuss the relevance of these phases to optical lattice experiments, as well as signatures of chiral symmetry breaking in time-of-flight images.
Recently, the lattice shaking technique has been used to couple different Bloch bands resonantly. For the one-dimensional (1D) case in which shaking is along only one direction, experimental observation of domain-wall formation has been explained by superfluid Ising transition. Inspired by these, we generalize to a two-dimensional case in which shaking is along two orthogonal directions. Analogous to the 1D case, we find three different phases, the normal superfluid (NSF) phase, the
D4 symmetry-breaking superfluid
(D4SF) phase, and the Mott insulator (MI) phase. Furthermore, we demonstrate that an interaction effect induced by inhomogeneous band mixing can modify the critical shaking amplitude. Unlike in the 1D case, shaking types also can modify the critical shaking amplitude. We also construct a low-energy effective field theory to study the quantum criticality of bosons near the tricritical point of NSF,
D4SF, and MI phases. Moreover, we find a Bose liquid with anisotropically algebraic order and propose to change a Bose-Einstein condensate into a noncondensed Bose liquid by tuning the shaking amplitude approaching the critical value.