The objective of this paper is the theoretical description of the Mott insulator to superfluid quantum phase transition of a Bose gas in an optical lattice. In former works the Rayleigh-Schr\"odinger perturbation theory was used within a mean-field approach, which yields partially nonphysical results since the degeneracy between two adjacent Mott lobes is not taken into account. In order to correct such nonphysical results we apply the Brillouin-Wigner perturbation theory to the mean-field approximation of the Bose-Hubbard model. Detailed explanations of how to use the Brillouin-Wigner theory are presented, including a graphical approach that allows one to efficiently keep track of the respective analytic terms. To prove the validity of this computation, the results are compared with other works. Besides the analytic calculation of the phase boundary from Mott insulator to superfluid phase, the condensate density is also determined by simultaneously solving two algebraic equations. The analytical and numerical results turn out to be physically meaningful and can cover a region of system parameters inaccessible until now. Our results are of particular interest provided a harmonic trap is added to the former calculations in a homogeneous system, in view of describing an experiment within the local-density approximation. Thus, the paper represents an essential preparatory work for determining the experimentally observed wedding cake structure of particle-density profile at both finite temperature and finite hopping.
The objective of this paper is the theoretical description of the Mott insulator to superfluid quantum phase transition of a Bose gas in an optical lattice. In former works the Rayleigh-Schr"odinger perturbation theory was used within a mean-field approach, which yields partially nonphysical results since the degeneracy between two adjacent Mott lobes is not taken into account. In order to correct such nonphysical results we apply the Brillouin-Wigner perturbation theory to the mean-field approximation of the Bose-Hubbard model. Detailed explanations of how to use the Brillouin-Wigner theory are presented, including a graphical approach that allows one to efficiently keep track of the respective analytic terms. To prove the validity of this computation, the results are compared with other works. Besides the analytic calculation of the phase boundary from Mott insulator to superfluid phase, the condensate density is also determined by simultaneously solving two algebraic equations. The analytical and numerical results turn out to be physically meaningful and can cover a region of system parameters inaccessible until now. Our results are of particular interest provided a harmonic trap is added to the former calculations in a homogeneous system, in view of describing an experiment within the local-density approximation. Thus, the paper represents an essential preparatory work for determining the experimentally observed wedding cake structure of particle-density profile at both finite temperature and finite hopping.
Bosonic atoms confined in optical lattices can exist in two different phases, Mott insulator and superfluid, depending on the strength of the system parameters, such as the on-site interaction between particles and the hopping parameter. This work is motivated by the fact that nondegenerate perturbation theory applied to the mean-field approximation of the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian at both zero and finite temperature fails to give consistent results in the vicinity of the Mott insulator--superfluid phase transition, e.g., the order parameter calculated via nondegenerate perturbation theory reveals an unphysical behavior between neighboring Mott lobes, which is an explicit consequence of degeneracy problems that artificially arise from such a treatment. This problem also appears in other bosonic systems that present similar Mott-lobe structures. Therefore, in order to fix this problem, we propose a finite-temperature degenerate perturbation theory approach based on a projection operator formalism which ends up solving such degeneracy problems in order to obtain physically consistent results for the order parameter near the phase transition.
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 study the quantum phase transition from a superfluid to a Mott insulator in optical lattices using a Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian. For this purpose we develop a field theoretical approach in terms of path integral formalism to calculate the second-order quantum corrections to the energy density as well as to the superfluid fraction in cubic optical lattices. Using the present approach, the condensate fraction and ground-state energy are calculated as functions of the s-wave scattering length. In contrast to the Bogoliubov model, which is, technically speaking, a one-loop approximation, we carry the calculation up to two loops and improve the result further by variational perturbation theory. The result suggests that the quantum phase transition exists.
We work out two different analytical methods for calculating the boundary of the Mott-insulator--superfluid (MI-SF) quantum phase transition for scalar bosons in cubic optical lattices of arbitrary dimension at zero temperature which improve upon the seminal mean-field result. The first one is a variational method, which is inspired by variational perturbation theory, whereas the second one is based on the field-theoretic concept of effective potential. Within both analytical approaches we achieve a considerable improvement of the location of the MI-SF quantum phase transition for the first Mott lobe in excellent agreement with recent numerical results from quantum Monte Carlo simulations in two and three dimensions. Thus, our analytical results for the whole quantum phase diagram can be regarded as being essentially exact for all practical purposes.
We study the ground-state properties of mixtures of strongly interacting bosonic atoms in an optical lattice. Applying a mean-field approximation to the Hubbard model for Bose-Bose mixtures, we calculate the densities and superfluid order parameters for both species. Due to the repulsive interaction between the two species, the system exhibits phase separation. First, in the extreme limit of the zero-hopping case, we derive analytical expressions for the phase boundaries. In particular, we derive the conditions for phase separation in the Mott insulator phase. We find that the conditions for the phase separation depend on the on-site interactions as well as the occupation numbers. In particular, we show that the coexisting state appears by varying the on-site inter-species interaction. We also show the phase diagram of the finite hopping case. Second, we calculate the spatial density profile of 87Rb-41K mixtures in the combined potential of a parabolic trap and an optical lattice using the local density approximation. We fixed the number of 87Rb and varied the number of 41K, and used the parameters estimated by experiments. We show that the phase separated 87Rb-41K mixtures distribute like in a parabolic trap case. Furthermore, we find that phase separated mixtures distribute a nesting structure.
Beautiful experiments have shown that bosons in optical lattices provide a physical system with an unprecedented degree of control; that they can generate strongly correlated states; and that, as long-term goals, they may be useful for simulating other many-body systems, or realising a quantum computer. Recently a practical scheme for measuring temperature in an optical lattice has been demonstrated, which marks an important milestone necessary for the detailed study of the thermodynamics of this system. In this thesis, we consider both the translationally-invariant lattice, and the combined harmonic trap and optical lattice. We use an extended Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian which goes beyond the usual Bose-Hubbard approach, and is valid for shallower lattices and higher temperatures, by allowing for beyond nearest-neighbour hopping and excited bands, and we have developed an approximation scheme for off-site interactions. We derive the equations of the Popov approximation to the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov method for our Hamiltonian, and diagonalise these equations in the local density approximation (LDA). We examine the density of states of the optical lattice in detail and in various limits. We derive new results on the structure of the density of states, and, in the ideal case, we compare the density of states from the full diagonalisation with our LDA calculation. We make an efficient numerical implementation of our theory and compare the results with the full diagonalisation (for the non-interacting case) and with the limited experimental results currently available. We consider the significance of beyond nearest-neighbour hopping and excited bands and illustrate the properties of our model. In contrast to the trapped gas with no lattice, few thermodynamic results for cold bosons in an optical lattice have been calculated. We analytically derive the first practical formula for the critical temperature in an optical lattice by using simplified shapes for the density of states. We derive corrections for the influence of excited bands, the finite-size effect and mean-field interactions. In all of these cases, we compare our results to full numerical calculations and show that the validity range of our method is complementary to that of the effective-mass approximation, so that the simple descriptions extend over a wide range.