We study bosonic atoms in optical honeycomb lattices with anisotropic tunneling and find dimerized Mott insulator (MI) phases with fractional filling. These incompressible insulating phases are characterized by an interaction-driven localization of particles in respect to the individual dimers and large local particle-number fluctuations within the dimers. We calculate the ground-state phase diagrams and the excitation spectra using an accurate cluster mean-field method. The cluster treatment enables us to probe the fundamental excitations of the dimerized MI where the excitation gap is dominated by the intra-dimer tunneling amplitude. This allows the distinction from normal Mott insulating phases gapped by the on-site interaction. In addition, we present analytical results for the phase diagram derived by a higher-order strong-coupling perturbative expansion approach. By computing finite lattices with large diameters the influence of a harmonic confinement is discussed in detail. It is shown that a large fraction of atoms forms the dimerized MI under experimental conditions. The necessary anisotropic tunneling can be realized either by periodic driving of the optical lattice or by engineering directly a dimerized lattice potential. The dimers can be mapped to their antisymmetric states creating a lattice with coupled p -orbitals.
We study bosonic atoms in optical honeycomb lattices with anisotropic tunneling and find dimerized Mott insulator (MI) phases with fractional filling. These incompressible insulating phases are characterized by an interaction-driven localization of particles in respect to the individual dimers and large local particle-number fluctuations within the dimers. We calculate the ground-state phase diagrams and the excitation spectra using an accurate cluster mean-field method. The cluster treatment enables us to probe the fundamental excitations of the dimerized MI where the excitation gap is dominated by the intra-dimer tunneling amplitude. This allows the distinction from normal Mott insulating phases gapped by the on-site interaction. In addition, we present analytical results for the phase diagram derived by a higher-order strong-coupling perturbative expansion approach. By computing finite lattices with large diameters the influence of a harmonic confinement is discussed in detail. It is shown that a large fraction of atoms forms the dimerized MI under experimental conditions. The necessary anisotropic tunneling can be realized either by periodic driving of the optical lattice or by engineering directly a dimerized lattice potential. The dimers can be mapped to their antisymmetric states creating a lattice with coupled p -orbitals.
Hexagonal optical lattices, emulating graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) structures, provide a versatile platform for exploring strongly correlated quantum matter. Using continuous-space exact diagonalization and quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we investigate the phase diagrams of ultracold bosons in honeycomb and h-BN lattices. For the honeycomb lattice, we find significant deviations from the standard Bose--Hubbard model even for strong lattice amplitudes. We observe suppressed Mott insulator lobes and the absence of higher-order insulating phases, which we attribute to strong density-assisted tunneling effects. In the h-BN case, a rich phase diagram emerges, featuring multiple Mott lobes with various sublattice occupations, driven by the interplay of lattice asymmetry, interactions, and particle filling. Our results highlight the necessity of continuous-space treatments for capturing the full complexity of bosonic quantum phases in hexagonal geometries, paving the way for experimental realizations with ultracold atoms and further theoretical work.
We theoretically study the excitation spectrum of confined macroscopic optical lattices in the Mott-insulating limit. For large systems, a fast numerical method is proposed to calculate the ground state filling and excitation energies. We introduce many-particle on-site energies capturing multi-band effects and discuss tunnelling on a perturbative level using an effectively restricted Hilbert space. Results for small one-dimensional lattices obtained by this method are in good agreement with the exact multi-band diagonalization of the Hamiltonian. Spectral properties associated with the formation of regions with constant filling, so-called Mott shells, are investigated and interfaces between the shells with strong particle fluctuations are characterized by gapless local excitations.
By generalizing the traditional single-site strong coupling expansion approach to a cluster one, we study the zero-temperature phase diagram of bosonic atoms in a trimerized Kagomé optical lattice. Some new features are present in this system. Due to the strong intra-trimer hopping interaction, there will be a new Mott insulator (MI), which is by definition incompressible but with a fractional filling per trimer. This is different from the traditional MI, which has an integral filling and originates only from the repulsive interaction between particles. We investigate the MI-to-superfluid transition and the nature of the fractional MI by calculating the critical exponents of phase transitions and the low-lying energy excitation spectra of quasiparticles (quasihole). We will show how the low-energy properties of this system can be understood qualitatively as a Bose-Hubbard model in triangular lattice from the point of view of the cluster strong coupling expansion. We also discuss how our results are related to experiment by studying the Bragg spectroscopy.
In this work we consider a system of spinless fermions with nearest and next-to-nearest neighbor repulsive Hubbard interactions on a honeycomb lattice, and propose and analyze a realistic scheme for analog quantum simulation of this model with cold atoms in a two-dimensional hexagonal optical lattice. To this end, we first derive the zero-temperature phase diagram of the interacting model within a mean-field theory treatment. We show that besides a semimetallic and a charge-density-wave ordered phase, the system exhibits a quantum anomalous Hall phase, which is generated dynamically, i.e., purely as a result of the repulsive fermionic interactions and in the absence of any external gauge fields. We establish the topological nature of this dynamically created Mott-insulating phase by the numerical calculation of a Chern number, and we study the possibility of coexistence of this phase with any of the other phases characterized by local order parameters. Based on the knowledge of the mean-field phase diagram, we then discuss in detail how the interacting Hamiltonian can be engineered effectively by state-of-the-art experimental techniques for laser dressing of cold fermionic ground-state atoms with electronically excited Rydberg states that exhibit strong dipolar interactions.
We study the ground-state properties of ultracold bosonic atoms in a state-dependent graphenelike honeycomb optical lattice, where the degeneracy between the two triangular sublattices A and B can be lifted. We discuss the various geometries accessible with this lattice setup and present a scheme to control the energy offset with external magnetic fields. The competition of the on-site interaction with the offset energy leads to Mott phases characterized by population imbalances between the sublattices. For the definition of an optimal Hubbard model, we demonstrate a scheme that allows for the efficient computation of Wannier functions. Using a cluster mean-field method, we compute the phase diagrams and provide a universal representation for arbitrary energy offsets. We find good agreement with the experimental data for the superfluid to Mott insulator transition.
The single-orbital Hubbard model is often a good description of the low energy dynamics of strongly correlated electron systems. Importantly, the single-orbital Hubbard model at half-filling is able to capture the Mott metal-insulator transition that occurs in many materials. However, there are insulating phases (as well as other exotic phases) that occur due to strong electronic correlations in materials that are away from half-filling. In many cases, these additional phases occur because the constituent electrons of the material come from multi-orbital atomic environments that require more complicated descriptions such as the multi-orbital Hubbard model. In other cases, as we show in this thesis, the rich phase diagram arises from the underlying lattice because of special geometric features.For example, decorated lattices, which often occur in organometallics (e.g., metal-organic frameworks (MOFs)), have geometrical complexity due to the molecular structures that decorate the lattice. We argue that the effective description for many of these materials is the single-orbital Hubbard model. Yet, these materials still have rich phase diagrams because the molecular structures of the material cause effective multi-orbital interactions generated from the local Coulomb interaction.We investigate the single-orbital Hubbard model on the decorated honeycomb lattice at zero temperature using rotationally invariant slave-boson (RISB) theory in the mean-field approximation, at a range of fillings. Numerous metal-insulator transitions occur - the insulating phases include a real-space Mott insulator, a dimer Mott insulator, a trimer Mott insulator, flat-band ferromagnets, and a spin-1 Mott insulator, dominated by spin-triplet fluctuations. This menagerie of phases is caused by effective multi-orbital interactions arising from the interplay of electronic correlations, lattice structure, and band filling effects. For example, with only on-site Coulomb interactions, the spin-1 Mott insulator is driven by an effective Hund's coupling on a three-site ring that favors the formation of triplets when the three-site ring has four electrons. We argue that this exotic phase may be realized in layers of the organometallic molecular crystal Mo3S7(dmit)3.