The extended Bose-Hubbard model with correlated tunneling exhibits staggered superfluid and supersolid quantum phases. We study finite-temperature phase transitions of quantum phases of dipolar bosons in a two-dimensional optical lattice using Gutzwiller mean-field and quantum Monte Carlo approaches. When nearest-neighbor repulsion is comparable to the on-site interaction, we find that the two topologically distinct superfluids are separated by a normal-fluid phase, while at stronger off-site interactions, density-modulated insulating quantum phases appear. We estimate the critical temperature of the staggered-superfluid to normal-fluid transition and show that this transition is of the Kosterlitz-Thouless type. Finally, we elucidate the coexistence of staggered quantum phases in the presence of an external trapping potential. Our study paves the way to observe novel staggered quantum phases in dipolar optical lattice experiments.
Current experiments on atomic gases in highly anisotropic traps present the opportunity to study in detail the low temperature phases of two-dimensional inhomogeneous systems. Although, in an ideal gas, the trapping potential favors Bose-Einstein condensation at finite temperature, interactions tend to destabilize the condensate, leading to a superfluid Kosterlitz-Thouless-Berezinskii phase with a finite superfluid mass density but no long-range order, as in homogeneous fluids. The transition in homogeneous systems is conveniently described in terms of dissociation of topological defects (vortex-antivortex pairs). However, trapped two-dimensional gases are more directly approached by generalizing the microscopic theory of the homogeneous gas. In this paper, we first derive, via a diagrammatic expansion, the scaling structure near the phase transition in a homogeneous system, and then study the effects of a trapping potential in the local density approximation. We find that a weakly interacting trapped gas undergoes a Kosterlitz-Thouless-Berezinskii transition from the normal state at a temperature slightly below the Bose-Einstein transition temperature of the ideal gas. The characteristic finite superfluid mass density of a homogeneous system just below the transition becomes strongly suppressed in a trapped gas.
We present a study of phase transition to macroscopic superfluidity for an ultracold bosonic gas confined in a combined trap formed by a one-dimensional optical lattice and a harmonic potential, focusing on the critical temperature of this system and the interference patterns of the Bose gas released from the combined trap. Based on a semiclassical energy spectrum, we develop an analytic approximation for the critical temperature
Tc, and compare the analytic results with that obtained by numerical computations. For finite temperatures below
Tc, we calculate the interference patterns for both the normal gas and the superfluid gas. The total interference pattern shows a feature of ``peak on a peak.'' As a comparison, we also present the experimentally observed interference patterns of
87Rb atoms released from a one-dimensional optical lattice system in accord with our theoretical model. Our observations are consistent with the theoretical results.