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arXiv:1208.4852 · Physical Review B

Quantum dynamics of disordered bosons in an optical lattice

Chien-Hung Lin, Rajdeep Sensarma, K. Sengupta, S. Das Sarma

Published Dec 26, 2012• 12 citations
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Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.86.214207

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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 \ensuremathτ\ensuremath{\tau}\ensuremathτ. For the clean case the density of excitations goes to a constant, while the order parameter and energy relax as 1/\ensuremathτ1/\ensuremath{\tau}1/\ensuremathτ and 1/\ensuremathτ21/{\ensuremath{\tau}}^{2}1/\ensuremathτ2 respectively. With disorder, the excitation density decays exponentially with \ensuremathτ\ensuremath{\tau}\ensuremathτ, 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 \ensuremathτ\ensuremath{\tau}\ensuremathτ is increased.
"This thesis presents research on a variety of dynamical phenomena in strongly correlated systems. We use 87Rb atoms trapped in a disordered optical lattice to realize the 3D Bose Hubbard model, with independently, dynamically tunable lattice depth and disorder strength. The equilibrium behavior of the Bose Hubbard and disordered Bose Hubbard models are understood, but there are many outstanding questions about dynamics. One area of interest is in dynamical behavior near quantum phase boundaries, such as the generation of quench-induced excitations in the presence of disorder. Another area concerns heat flow, relaxation, and thermalization. The primary focus of this thesis is driving a gas across a disorder-induced quantum phase transition from the Bose glass to the superfluid phase via quenching the disorder. We measured excitations generated during the quench and related them to crossing the equilibrium phase transition determined by quantum Monte Carlo simulations of the trapped system. The behavior we observe is reminiscent of the quantum Kibble Zurek mechanism, where the relaxation timescale diverges and local fluctuations are ""frozen"" into the system near the phase boundary. Understanding how disorder impacts the Kibble Zurek paradigm about behavior near a phase boundary provides insight into the dynamics of strongly interacting, disordered systems. The three other works discussed in this thesis concern relaxation and energy transfer in clean optical lattices. Understanding these dynamical properties of lattice gases is key to developing tools such as cooling in a lattice. In the first result, a gas comprised of two spin states was loaded into a spin-dependent optical lattice, such that one spin state experienced the lattice, and the other did not. We found that when the lattice gas was heated, energy transfer to the non-lattice gas did not occur at higher lattice depths due to the mismatch in the dispersion relations. In the second result, lattice atoms were excited to a higher band and found to decay to the ground state via two mechanisms. One decay channel involved generating excitations in the non-lattice atoms, while the other channel involved collisions between lattice atoms, where one atom decayed to the ground state and the other was excited to a higher band. The final result measured relaxation timescales by removing atoms with low quasimomentum and measuring rethermalization. The observed timescales are faster than the tunneling time and interaction time of the lattice. Proof-of-principle cooling was also demonstrated by removing atoms with higher quasimomentum and allowing the remaining atoms rethermalize to a cooler temperature."
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The question of how the low-energy properties of disordered quantum systems may be connected to exotic localization phenomena at high energy is a key open question in the context of quantum glasses and many-body localization. In the preceding Letter [L. Villa, S. J. Thomson, and L. Sanchez-Palencia, preceding Letter, Phys. Rev. A 104, L021301 (2021)] we have shown that key features of the excitation spectrum of a disordered system can be efficiently probed from out-of-equilibrium dynamics following a quantum quench, providing distinctive signatures of the various phases. Here we extend this work by providing a more-in-depth study of the behavior of the quench spectral functions associated with different observables and investigating an extended parameter regime. We provide a detailed introduction to quench spectroscopy for disordered systems and show how spectral properties can be probed using both local operators and two-point correlation functions. We benchmark the technique using the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model in the presence of a random external potential, focusing on the low-lying excitations, and demonstrate that quench spectroscopy can distinguish the Mott insulator, superfluid, and Bose glass phases. We then explicitly reconstruct the zero-temperature phase diagram of the disordered Bose-Hubbard at fixed filling using two independent methods, experimentally accessible via both time-of-flight imaging and quantum gas microscopy, respectively, and demonstrate that quench spectroscopy can give valuable insights into the distribution of rare regions within disordered systems.
We develop a projection operator formalism for studying both the zero-temperature equilibrium phase diagram and the nonequilibrium dynamics of the Bose-Hubbard model. Our work, which constitutes an extension of that of Trefzger and Sengupta [Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 095702 (2011)], shows that the method provides an accurate description of the equilibrium zero-temperature phase diagram of the Bose-Hubbard model for several lattices in two and three dimensions. We show that the accuracy of this method increases with the coordination number z0{z}_{0}z0​ of the lattice and reaches to within 0.50.5%0.5 of quantum Monte Carlo data for lattices with z0=6{z}_{0}=6z0​=6. We compute the excitation spectra of the bosons using this method in the Mott and the superfluid phases and compare our results with mean-field theory. We also show that the same method may be used to analyze the nonequilibrium dynamics of the model both in the Mott phase and near the superfluid-insulator quantum critical point where the hopping amplitude JJJ and the on-site interaction UUU satisfy ${z}_{0}J/U\ensuremath{\ll}1$. In particular, we study the nonequilibrium dynamics of the model both subsequent to a sudden quench of the hopping amplitude JJJ and during a ramp from Ji{J}_{i}Ji​ to Jf{J}_{f}Jf​ characterized by a ramp time $\ensuremath{\tau}$ and exponent $\ensuremath{\alpha}$: $J(t)={J}_{i}+({J}_{f}\ensuremath{-}{J}_{i}){(t/\ensuremath{\tau})}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$. We compute the wave function overlap FFF, the residual energy QQQ, the superfluid order parameter $\ensuremath{\Delta}(t)$, the equal-time order parameter correlation function C(t)C(t)C(t), and the defect formation probability PPP for the above-mentioned protocols and provide a comparison of our results to their mean-field counterparts. We find that QQQ, FFF, and PPP do not exhibit the expected universal scaling. We explain this absence of universality and show that our results for linear ramps compare well with the recent experimental observations.
We study ground-state phase diagrams and excitation spectra of Bose-Bose mixtures in an optical lattice by applying the Gutzwiller approximation to the two-component Bose-Hubbard model. A case of equal hoppings and equal intra-component interactions for both components is considered. Due to the existence of inter-component interaction, there appear several quantum phases, such as the superfluid, paired superfluid, and counterflow superfluid phases. We find that the transition from superfluid (SF) to Mott insulator (MI) with even filling factors can be of the first order for a wide range of the chemical potential. We calculate the excitation spectra as a useful probe to identify the quantum phases and the SF-to-MI transitions. In the excitation spectra of the SF phase, there are two gapless modes and a few gapful modes, which respectively correspond to phase and amplitude fluctuations of the order parameters. At the SF-to-MI transition point, we show that the energy gaps of certain amplitude modes reach zero for the second-order transition while they remain finite for the first-order one. Since the excitation spectrum can be measured by the Bragg scattering, we calculate the dynamical structure factor by using the linear response theory. We consider three types of density fluctuations, and show that the density fluctuations are coupled to different excitation branches in different quantum phases.
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