arXiv:1901.10672 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B
Thermal transitions of the modulated superfluid for spin-orbit coupled correlated bosons in an optical lattice
Arijit Dutta, Abhishek Joshi, K. Sengupta, Pinaki Majumdar
Abstract
We investigate the thermal physics of a Bose-Hubbard model with Rashba spin-orbit coupling starting from a strong coupling mean-field ground state. The essential role of the spin-orbit coupling $\left(\ensuremath{\gamma}\right)$ is to promote condensation of the bosons at a finite wave vector ${\mathbit{k}}_{0}$. We find that the bosons display either homogeneous or phase-twisted or orbital ordered superfluid phases, depending on $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ and the interspecies interaction strength $\left(\ensuremath{\lambda}\right)$. We show that an increase of $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ leads to suppression of the critical interaction ${U}_{c}$ for the superfluid to Mott insulator transition in the ground state and a reduction of the ${T}_{c}$ for superfluid to Bose-liquid transition at a fixed interaction strength. We capture the thermal broadening in the momentum distribution function, and the real space profiles of the thermally disordered magnetic textures, including their homogenization for $T\ensuremath{\gtrsim}{T}_{c}$. We provide a Landau theory based description of the ground state phase boundaries and thermal transition scales and discuss experiments which can test our theory.