We investigate the zero-temperature phase diagram of interacting Bose gases in the presence of a simple cubic optical lattice, going beyond the regime where the mapping to the single-band Bose-Hubbard model is reliable. Our computational approach is a new hybrid quantum Monte Carlo method which combines algorithms used to simulate homogeneous quantum fluids in continuous space with those used for discrete lattice models of strongly correlated systems. We determine the critical interaction strength and optical lattice intensity where the superfluid-to-insulator transition takes place, considering also the regime of shallow optical lattices and strong interatomic interactions. The implications of our findings for the supersolid state of matter are discussed.
Bosonic atoms confined in optical lattices are described by the Bose-Hubbard model and can exist in two different phases, Mott insulator or superfluid, depending on the strength of the system parameters. In the vicinity of the phase boundary, there are degeneracies that occur between every two adjacent Mott lobes. Because of this, nondegenerate perturbation theory fails to give meaningful results for the condensate density: it predicts a phase transition in a point of the phase diagram where no transition occurs. Motivated by this, we develop two different degenerate perturbative methods to solve the degeneracy-related problems. Moreover, we study the one-dimensional repulsively interacting Bose gas under harmonic confinement, with special attention to the asymptotic behavior of the momentum distribution, which is a universal
k−4 decay characterized by the Tan's contact. The latter constitutes a direct signature of the short-range correlations in such an interacting system and provides valuable insights about the role of the interparticle interactions. We investigate the system constituted of
N interacting particles in the strongly interacting limit. In such a regime, the strong interparticle interaction makes the bosons behave similarly to the ideal Fermi gas. Because of the difficulty in analytically solving the system for
N particles at finite interaction, the Tonks-Girardeau regime provides a favorable scenario to probe the contact. Therefore, we are able to provide an analytical formula for the Tan's contact. Furthermore, we analyze the scaling properties of the Tan's contact in terms of
N in the high-temperature regime as well as in the strongly interacting regime. Finally, we compare our analytical calculations of the Tan's contact to quantum Monte Carlo simulations and discuss some fundamental differences between the canonical and the grand-canonical ensembles.
We investigate how strongly interacting bosons, described by the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian, transition from the Mott insulator to the superfluid phase and, ultimately, to a regime of vanishing interaction where the system smoothly transitions to an ensemble of free bosons undergoing Bose-Einstein condensation. Our study focuses on bosons residing on a three-dimensional simple cubic lattice, with tight-binding interactions characterized by the kinetic energy
t between neighboring lattice sites and on-site repulsion
U. To achieve this, we develop a formalism based on mapping the original quantum mechanical Hamiltonian onto an effective quantum spherical model. This approach is nonperturbative in interaction energy and spans the entire range of the interaction parameter
U. Our findings are presented through a series of multiparameter phase diagrams that include temperature, interaction energy, chemical potential, and particle density, highlighting the corresponding critical surfaces and lines. In this context, we address the issue of quantum critical points at fixed densities, which appear as endpoints in the temperature-interaction phase diagram. We also compare our theoretical results, where applicable, with other approaches, including quantum Monte Carlo simulations.
We investigate the superfluid-insulator transition of one-dimensional interacting bosons in both deep and shallow periodic potentials. We compare a theoretical analysis based on quantum Monte Carlo simulations in continuum space and Luttinger liquid approach with experiments on ultracold atoms with tunable interactions and optical lattice depth. Experiments and theory are in excellent agreement. Our study provides a quantitative determination of the critical parameters for the Mott transition and defines the regimes of validity of widely used approximate models, namely, the Bose-Hubbard and sine-Gordon models.
We have studied the thermodynamic properties of noninteracting gases in periodic lattice potential at arbitrary integer fillings and compared them with that of ideal homogeneous gases. By deriving explicit expressions for the thermodynamic quantities and performing exact numerical calculations, we have found that the dependence of e.g., entropy and energy on the temperature in the normal phase is rather weak especially at large filling factors. In the Bose condensed phase, their power dependence on the reduced temperature is nearly linear, which is in contrast to that of ideal homogeneous gases. We evaluated the discontinuity in the slope of the specific heat which turned out to be approximately the same as that of the ideal homogeneous Bose (IHB) gas for filling factor ν = 1. The discontinuity i.e. the jump in the heat capacity per particle linearly decreases with increasing ν. These results may serve as a checkpoint for various experiments on optical lattices as well as theoretical studies of weakly interacting Bose systems in periodic potentials being a starting point for perturbative calculations.
In this paper we address the behavior of the superfluid transition temperature
Tc in the attractive Hubbard model. The attractive Hubbard model can be regarded as the generalization of the BCS to Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) crossover to a lattice and, as such, may have implications for future optical lattice studies. Nevertheless, the BEC limit of the Hubbard model is very different from that of the better-studied Fermi gases, owing to the strong intersite repulsion between pairs. Here we address systematically the effects of pairing fluctuations for all filling fractions over the entire range of attractive interaction strength. A central conclusion of our work is that in a lattice, around half filling, the smooth evolution from the BCS to the BEC limits is interrupted:
Tc vanishes when the system approaches the bosonic regime with increasing interaction strength. We suggest that this interruption of crossover may signal a quantum critical transition to another form of superfluid not continuously connected to a BCS-like phase. A simple variational ansatz for an alternate ground state in this more strongly coupled superfluid is presented. A generalization of the (
s-wave) Hubbard model to
d-wave pairing allows us to address issues of relevance to high-
Tc superconductivity. The phase diagram (representing the pairing or pseudogap onset temperature
T∗ and
Tc) shows that here too one observes a vanishing of
Tc when
T∗ becomes sufficiently large. Given this predicted breakdown of the crossover, and given the striking similarity to features of the cuprate phase diagram, we suggest that future experiments on ultracold fermions in optical lattices should not be exclusively limited to the repulsive Hubbard model, but should address the attractive model in order to elucidate features of high-temperature superconductivity.