The recent experimental condensation of ultracold atoms in a triangular optical lattice with a negative effective tunneling parameter paves the way for the study of frustrated systems in a controlled environment. Here, we explore the critical behavior of the chiral phase transition in such a frustrated lattice in three dimensions. We represent the low-energy action of the lattice system as a two-component Bose gas corresponding to the two minima of the dispersion. The contact repulsion between the bosons separates into intra- and intercomponent interactions, referred to as
V0 and
V12, respectively. We first employ a Huang-Yang-Luttinger approximation of the free energy. For
V12/V0=2, which corresponds to the bare interaction, this approach suggests a first-order phase transition, at which both the
U(1) symmetry of condensation and the
Z2 symmetry of the emergent chiral order are broken simultaneously. Furthermore, we perform a renormalization-group calculation at one-loop order. We demonstrate that the coupling regime $0<{V}_{12}/{V}_{0}\ensuremath{\le}1$ shares the critical behavior of the Heisenberg fixed point at
V12/V0=1. For
V12/V0>1 we show that
V0 flows to a negative value, while
V12 increases and remains positive. This results in a breakdown of the effective quartic-field theory due to a cubic anisotropy and, again, suggests a discontinuous phase transition.
We study the quantum phase transitions and identify a tricritical point between a normal Bose superfluid, a superfluid that breaks additional Z(2) Ising symmetry, and a Mott insulator in a recent shaken optical lattice experiment. We show that near the transition between normal and Z(2) symmetry breaking superfluids, bosons can condense into a momentum state with high or even locally maximum kinetic energies due to the interaction effect. We present a general low-energy effective field theory that treats both the superfluid transition and the Ising transition in a uniform framework. Using the perturbative renormalization group method, we find that the critical behavior of the quantum phase transition belongs to a universality class different from that of a dilute Bose gas.
We study the quantum phase transition in an atomic Bose gas near a Feshbach resonance in terms of the renormalization group. This quantum phase transition is characterized by an Ising order parameter. We show that in the low temperature regime where the quantum fluctuations dominate the low-energy physics this phase transition is of first order because of the coupling between the Ising order parameter and the Goldstone mode existing in the bosonic superfluid. However, when the thermal fluctuations become important, the phase transition turns into the second order one, which belongs to the three-dimensional Ising universality class. We also calculate the damping rate of the collective mode in the phase with only a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate near the second-order transition line, which can serve as an experimental signature of the second-order transition.
We study Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in three-dimensional two-component bosonic gases, characterizing the universal behaviors of the critical modes arising at the BEC transitions. For this purpose, we use field-theoretical (FT) renormalization-group (RG) methods and perform mean-field and numerical calculations. The FT RG analysis is based on the Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Phi}}}^{4}$ theory with two complex scalar fields which has the same symmetry as the bosonic system. In particular, for identical bosons with exchange
Z2 symmetry, coupled by effective density-density interactions, the global symmetry is ${\mathbb{Z}}_{2,e}\ensuremath{\bigotimes}\mathrm{U}(1)\ensuremath{\bigotimes}\mathrm{U}(1)$. At the BEC transition, it may break into ${\mathbb{Z}}_{2,e}\ensuremath{\bigotimes}{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}\ensuremath{\bigotimes}{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}$ when both components condense simultaneously, or to $\mathrm{U}(1)\ensuremath{\bigotimes}{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}$ when only one component condenses. This implies different universality classes for the corresponding critical behaviors. Numerical simulations of the two-component Bose-Hubbard model in the hard-core limit support the RG prediction: when both components condense simultaneously, the critical behavior is controlled by a decoupled XY fixed point, with unusual slowly decaying scaling corrections arising from the onsite interspecies interaction.
We derive the equation of state of bosons in an optical lattice in the framework of the Bose-Hubbard model. Near the density-driven Mott transition, the expression of the pressure $P(\ensuremath{\mu},T)$ versus chemical potential and temperature is similar to that of a dilute Bose gas but with renormalized mass
m∗ and scattering length
a∗. Here
m∗ is the mass of the elementary excitations at the quantum critical point governing the transition from the superfluid phase to the Mott-insulating phase, while
a∗ is related to their effective interaction at low energy. We use a nonperturbative renormalization-group approach to compute these parameters as a function of the ratio
t/U between hopping amplitude and on-site repulsion.
We derive the equation of state of a two-dimensional Bose gas in an optical lattice in the framework of the Bose-Hubbard model. We focus on the vicinity of the multicritical points where the quantum phase transition between the Mott insulator and the superfluid phase occurs at fixed density and belongs to the three-dimensional XY model universality class. Using a nonperturbative renormalization-group approach, we compute the pressure
P(μ,T) as a function of chemical potential and temperature. Our results compare favorably with a calculation based on the quantum O(2) model -- we find the same universal scaling function -- and allow us to determine the region of the phase diagram in the vicinity of a quantum multicritical point where the equation of state is universal. We also discuss the possible experimental observation of quantum XY criticality in a ultracold gas in an optical lattice.