We study the ground-state properties of the extended Bose-Hubbard model in a one-dimensional dimerized optical lattice. In the limit of strong on-site repulsion, i.e., hardcore bosons, and strong nearest-neighbor interaction, a stable density-wave (DW) phase is obtained at half-filling as a function of lattice dimerization. Interestingly, at quarter-filling we obtain the signatures of an insulating phase which has the character of both the bond order (BO) and the DW insulators, which we call a bond-order density-wave (BODW) phase. Moreover, we show that for a fixed hopping dimerization there occurs a BO-DW phase crossover as a function of the nearest-neighbor interaction and the BODW phase is more robust when the hopping dimerization is stronger. We further examine the stability of the BODW phase in the limit of finite on-site interactions.
The Bose-Hubbard model (BHM) has been widely explored to develop a profound understanding of the strongly correlated behavior of interacting bosons. Quantum simulators not only allow the exploration of the BHM but also extend it to models with interesting phenomena such as gapped phases with multiple orders and topological phases. In this work, an extended Bose-Hubbard model involving a dimerized one-dimensional model of long-range interacting hard-core bosons is studied. Bond-order density wave phases (BODW) are characterized in terms of their symmetry breaking and topological properties. At certain fillings, interactions combined with dimerized hoppings give rise to an emergent symmetry-breaking leading to BODW phases, which differs from the case of non-interacting models that require an explicit breaking of the symmetry. Specifically, the BODW phase at filling $\ensuremath{\rho}=1/3$ possesses no analog in the noninteracting model in terms of its symmetry-breaking properties and the unit cell structure. Upon changing the dimerization pattern, the system realizes topologically trivial BODW phases. At filling $\ensuremath{\rho}=1/4$, on-site density modulations are shown to stabilize the topological BODW phase. Our work provides the bridge between interacting and noninteracting BODW phases and highlights the significance of long-range interactions in a dimerized lattice by showing unique BODW phases that do not exist in the noninteracting model.
Recent advances in realizing nearly degenerate dipolar gases in optical lattices have enabled the study of quantum systems with long-range anisotropic interactions. Here, we investigate hard-core dipolar bosons on a two-dimensional square lattice described by an extended Bose--Hubbard model. Using path-integral quantum Monte Carlo simulations at fixed azimuthal angle
φ=45∘, we investigate density instabilities arising from first-order phase transitions. We start by mapping the ground-state phase diagram at half filling as a function of dipolar interaction strength and polar angle
θ. For weak interactions, the system remains superfluid for all
θ. Above a critical interaction strength, the superfluid phase becomes unstable and gives way to checkerboard, stripe, or incompressible phases depending on
θ. For
θ≳62∘, we find that half filling becomes unstable and only the empty state,
n=0, and the fully filled state,
n=1, are stable. Unlike recent experimental reports of a self-bound insulator at half filling, the homogeneous ground state does not support such a phase, but instead exhibits a direct first-order transition between
n=0 and
n=1. At finite temperature, thermal fluctuations shift the onset of density instabilities to larger
θ and stabilize intermediate fillings in the regime where half filling is unstable in the ground state. This leads to phase-separated states consisting of empty and fully filled regions that resemble the experimentally observed "self-bound insulator." In a harmonic trap, similar structures also emerge from phase coexistence associated with the underlying first-order transition.
We consider a minimal model to investigate the quantum phases of hardcore, polarized dipolar atoms confined in multilayer optical lattices. The model is a variant of the extended Bose-Hubbard model, which incorporates intralayer repulsion and interlayer attraction between the atoms in nearest-neighbor sites. We study the phases of this model emerging from the competition between the attractive interlayer interaction and the interlayer hopping. Our results from the analytical and cluster-Gutzwiller mean-field theories reveal that multimer formation occurs in the regime of weak intra- and interlayer hopping due to the attractive interaction. In addition, intralayer isotropic repulsive interaction results in the checkerboard ordering of the multimers. This leads to an incompressible checkerboard multimer phase at half-filling. At higher interlayer hopping, the multimers are destabilized to form resonating valence-bond-like states. Furthermore, we discuss the effects of thermal fluctuations on the quantum phases of the system.
We consider a single-component gas of dipolar bosons confined in a one-dimensional optical lattice, where the dipoles are aligned such that the long-ranged dipolar interactions are maximally repulsive. In the limit of zero inter-site hopping and sufficiently large on-site interaction, the phase diagram is a complete devil's staircase for filling fractions between 0 and 1: every commensurate state at a rational filling is stable over a finite interval in chemical potential, and for every chemical potential the system is in a gapped commensurate phase. We perturb away from this limit in two experimentally motivated directions involving the addition of hopping and a reduction of the onsite interaction. The addition of hopping alone yields a phase diagram, which we compute in perturbation theory in the hopping, where the commensurate Mott phases now compete with the superfluid. We capture the physics of the Mott-superfluid phase transitions via bosonization. In a finite trap, we argue using an LDA and simulated annealing that this results in regions of commensurate states separated by patches with dominant superfluid correlations. Further softening of the onsite interaction yields alternative commensurate states with double occupancies which can form a devil's staircase of their own; we describe these states and discuss the possible transitions between them. Adding a hopping term in this case produces one-dimensional "supersolids" which simultaneously exhibit discrete broken symmetries and superfluidity. The contents of this work was first published as a chapter in the doctoral thesis `On Exotic Orders in Strongly Correlated Systems' (Princeton University, 09/09, supervised by S. L. Sondhi), and constitutes a considerably more detailed version of [PRB 80: 174519 (2009)].
We analyze the ground-state properties of three-body constrained bosons in a one-dimensional optical lattice with staggered hoppings analogous to the double-well optical lattice. By considering attractive and repulsive on-site interactions between the bosons, we obtain the phase diagram which exhibits various quantum phases. Due to the double-well geometry and three-body constraint, several gapped phases such as the Mott insulators and dimer--bond-order phases emerge at commensurate densities in the repulsive interaction regime. Attractive interaction leads to the pair formation which leads to the pair--bond-order phase at unit filling, which resembles the valence-bond solid phase of composite bosonic pairs. At incommensurate densities, we see the signatures of the gapless pair superfluid phase.