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arXiv:1312.0515 · Europhysics Letters (EPL)

Replica symmetry breaking in the Bose glass

S. J. Thomson, Frank Krüger

Published Nov 1, 2014• 8 citations
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Abstract

We investigate the nature of the Bose glass phase of the disordered Bose-Hubbard model in $d>2$ 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 $γ=1/d$. 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.

DOI
10.1209/0295-5075/108/30002

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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 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.
Glassiness occurs when disorder and frustration cause local degrees of freedom to freeze despite the lack of long-range order. In systems of interacting bosons, such glassiness may involve a purely quantum degree of freedom$\unicode{x2014}$local phases of particle wave functions$\unicode{x2014}$partly analogous to spins in spin glasses. However, experimental identification of such phases is difficult because it requires prohibitively long measurement times or recourse to the elusive Edwards-Anderson order parameter. Moreover, the off-diagonal character of the phase makes it seemingly even harder to capture via typical observables. To address this issue, we study a system of strongly interacting bosons with random hoppings that features off-diagonal glassiness exhibiting replica symmetry breaking (RSB). We find that the glass phase is compressible, which distinguishes it from the Mott insulator. Thus, we establish a direct correspondence between phase-based glassy order and a measurable density-based thermodynamic observable. We use a framework adopted from spin glasses, including the replica trick within the one-step RSB scheme, to obtain meaningful results in the glass phase and to characterize the order parameters, RSB structure, slow relaxation, and compressibility. Glassiness in particle systems could thus be experimentally identified via measurements of compressibility, such as probing density fluctuations or the particle-number response to a trapping potential.
We examine the effects of disorder on dimerized quantum antiferromagnets in a magnetic field, using the mapping to a lattice gas of hard-core bosons with finite-range interactions. Combining a strong-coupling expansion, the replica method, and a one-loop renormalization-group analysis, we investigate the nature of the glass phases formed. We find that away from the tips of the Mott lobes, the transition is from a Mott insulator to a compressible Bose glass, however the compressibility at the tips is strongly suppressed. We identify this finding with the presence of a rare Mott glass phase and demonstrate that the inclusion of replica symmetry breaking is vital to correctly describe the glassy phases. This result suggests that the formation of Bose and Mott glass phases is not simply a weak localization phenomenon but is indicative of much richer physics. We discuss our results in the context of both ultracold atomic gases and spin-dimer materials.
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 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.
The large-NNN commensurate dirty boson model, in both the weakly and strongly commensurate cases, is considered via a perturbative renormalization-group treatment. In the weakly commensurate case, there exists a fixed line under renormalization-group flow, with varying amounts of disorder along the line. Including 1/N1/N1/N corrections causes the system to flow to strong disorder, indicating that the model does not have a phase transition perturbatively connected to the Mott insulator-superfluid (MI-SF) transition. I discuss the qualitative effects of instantons on the low-energy density of excitations. In the strongly commensurate case, a fixed point found previously is considered and results are obtained for higher moments of the correlation functions. To lowest order, correlation functions have a log-normal distribution. Finally, I prove two interesting theorems for large-NNN vector models with disorder, relevant to the problem of replica symmetry breaking and frustration in such systems.