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arXiv:1108.2512 · Physical Review A

Instabilities of bosonic spin currents in optical lattices

Hoi-Yin Hui, Ryan Barnett, Rajdeep Sensarma, S. Das Sarma

Published Oct 11, 2011• 6 citations
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Abstract

We analyze the dynamical and energetic instabilities of spin currents in a system of two-component bosons in an optical lattice, with a particular focus on the N\'eel state. We consider both the weakly interacting superfluid and the strongly interacting Mott insulating limits as well as the regime near the superfluid-insulator transition and establish the criteria for the onset of these instabilities. We use Bogoliubov theory to treat the weakly interacting superfluid regime. Near the Mott transition, we calculate the stability phase diagram within a variational Gutzwiller wave-function approach. In the deep Mott limit we discuss the emergence of the Heisenberg model and calculate the stability diagram within this model. Though the Bogoliubov theory and the Heisenberg model (appropriate for the deep superfluid and the deep Mott-insulating phase, respectively) predict no dynamical instabilities, we find, interestingly, that between these two limiting cases there is a regime of dynamical instability. This result is relevant for the ongoing experimental efforts to realize a stable N\'eel-ordered state in multicomponent ultracold bosons.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.84.043615

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We analyze the dynamical and energetic instabilities of spin currents in a system of two-component bosons in an optical lattice, with a particular focus on the N'eel state. We consider both the weakly interacting superfluid and the strongly interacting Mott insulating limits as well as the regime near the superfluid-insulator transition and establish the criteria for the onset of these instabilities. We use Bogoliubov theory to treat the weakly interacting superfluid regime. Near the Mott transition, we calculate the stability phase diagram within a variational Gutzwiller wave-function approach. In the deep Mott limit we discuss the emergence of the Heisenberg model and calculate the stability diagram within this model. Though the Bogoliubov theory and the Heisenberg model (appropriate for the deep superfluid and the deep Mott-insulating phase, respectively) predict no dynamical instabilities, we find, interestingly, that between these two limiting cases there is a regime of dynamical instability. This result is relevant for the ongoing experimental efforts to realize a stable N'eel-ordered state in multicomponent ultracold bosons.
We present a theoretical analysis of the phase diagram of two-component bosons on an optical lattice. A new formalism is developed which treats the effective spin interactions in the Mott and superfluid phases on the same footing. Using this new approach we chart the phase boundaries of the broken spin symmetry states up to the Mott to superfluid transition and beyond. Near the transition point, the magnitude of spin exchange can be very large, which facilitates the experimental realization of spin-ordered states. We find that spin and quantum fluctuations have a dramatic effect on the transition, making it first order in extended regions of the phase diagram. When each species is at integer filling, an additional phase transition may occur, from a spin-ordered insulator to a Mott insulator with no broken symmetries. We determine the phase boundaries in this regime and show that this is essentially a Mott transition in the spin sector.
The stability of superfluid currents in a system of ultracold bosons was studied using a moving optical lattice. Superfluid currents in a very weak lattice become unstable when their momentum exceeds 0.5 recoil momentum. Superfluidity vanishes already for zero momentum as the lattice deep reaches the Mott insulator (MI) phase transition. We study the phase diagram for the disappearance of superfluidity as a function of momentum and lattice depth between these two limits. Our phase boundary extrapolates to the critical lattice depth for the superfluid-to-MI transition with 2% precision. When a one-dimensional gas was loaded into a moving optical lattice a sudden broadening of the transition between stable and unstable phases was observed.
We study collective modes and superfluidity of spin-1 bosons with antiferromagnetic interactions in an optical lattice based on the time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau (TDGL) equation derived from the spin-1 Bose-Hubbard model. Specifically, we examine the stability of supercurrents in the polar phase in the vicinity of the Mott insulating phase with even filling factors. Solving the linearized TDGL equation, we obtain gapless spin-nematic modes and gapful spin-wave modes in the polar phase that arise due to the breaking of S2{S}^{2}S2 symmetry in spin space. Supercurrents exhibit dynamical instabilities induced by growing collective modes. In contrast to the second-order phase transition, the critical momentum for mass currents is finite at the phase boundary of the first-order superfluid-Mott insulator (SF-MI) phase transition. Furthermore, the critical momentum remains finite throughout the metastable SF phase and approaches zero towards the phase boundary, at which the metastable SF state disappears. We also study the stability of spin currents motivated by recent experiments for spinor gases. The critical momentum for spin currents is found to be zero, where a spin-nematic mode causes the dynamical instability. We investigate the origin of the zero critical momentum for spin currents and find it attributed to the fact that the polar state becomes energetically unstable even in the presence of an infinitesimal spin current. We discuss implications of the zero critical momentum for spin currents for the stability of the polar state.
We analyze the stability of superfluid currents in a system of strongly interacting ultracold atoms in an optical lattice. We show that such a system undergoes a dynamic, irreversible phase transition at a critical phase gradient that depends on the interaction strength between atoms. At commensurate filling, the phase boundary continuously interpolates between the classical modulation instability of a weakly interacting condensate and the equilibrium quantum phase transition into a Mott insulator state at which the critical current vanishes. We argue that quantum fluctuations smear the transition boundary in low dimensional systems. Finally we discuss the implications to realistic experiments.
We study dynamical and energetic instabilities in the transport properties of Bloch waves for atomic multicomponent Bose-Einstein condensates in optical lattices in the tight-binding limit. We obtain stability criteria analytically, as a function of superfluid velocities and interaction parameters, in several cases, for two-component and spinor condensates. In the two-species case we find that the presence of the other condensate component can stabilize the superfluid flow of an otherwise unstable condensate and that the free space dynamical miscibility condition of the two species can be reversed by tuning the superfluid flow velocities. In spin-1 condensates, we find the steady-state Bloch wave solutions and characterize their stability criteria. We find that generally more regions of dynamical instability arise for the polar than for the ferromagnetic solutions. In the presence of magnetic Zeeman shifts, we find a richer variety of condensate solutions and find that the linear Zeeman shift can stabilize the superfluid flow in several cases of interest.
We study the dynamical instabilities of superfluid flows in the S=1S=1S=1 Bose-Hubbard model. The time evolution of each spin component in a condensate is calculated based on the dynamical Gutzwiller approximation for a wide range of interactions, from a weakly correlated regime to a strongly correlated regime near the Mott-insulator transition. Owing to the spin-dependent interactions, the superfluid flow of the spin-1 condensate decays at a different critical momentum from a spinless case when the interaction strength is the same. We furthermore calculate the dynamical phase diagram of this model and clarify that the obtained phase boundary has very different features depending on whether the average number of particles per site is even or odd. Finally, we analyze the density and spin modulations that appear in association with the dynamical instability. We find that spin modulations are highly sensitive to the presence of a uniform magnetic field.