Taking inspiration from the state-of-the art knowledge of the Bose-Hubbard (BH) model and recent methodological developments in its fermionic counterpart, this work deals with the study of the collective dynamics of a lattice Bose gas beyond the mean-field picture through a quantum description of its elementary excitations. The Hamiltonian quantization, performed via a Bogoliubov quadratization of the BH action within the Gutzwiller approach, allows to expand the effective action of the theory up to second order in the fluctuations around the mean-field solution, as well as to prefigure the possibility of identifying the main decay vertices of the collective modes and other effects that are not evident at the second-order level. This quantum description extends the standard Bogoliubov approach to the study of superfluid Bose systems for comprising higher excitation branches, including the Higgs mode in the superfluid phase, and identifies their physical meaning together with appropriate observables which could be taken into consideration for their experimental characterization. The ultimate aim of the quantization procedure is the determination of fundamental quantities as the depletion of the condensate and the effective superfluid fraction, which are not accessible by a mean-field description or not completely characterized in the regime of strong interactions.
Taking inspiration from the state-of-the art knowledge of the Bose-Hubbard (BH) model and recent methodological developments in its fermionic counterpart, this work deals with the study of the collective dynamics of a lattice Bose gas beyond the mean-field picture through a quantum description of its elementary excitations. The Hamiltonian quantization, performed via a Bogoliubov quadratization of the BH action within the Gutzwiller approach, allows to expand the effective action of the theory up to second order in the fluctuations around the mean-field solution, as well as to prefigure the possibility of identifying the main decay vertices of the collective modes and other effects that are not evident at the second-order level. This quantum description extends the standard Bogoliubov approach to the study of superfluid Bose systems for comprising higher excitation branches, including the Higgs mode in the superfluid phase, and identifies their physical meaning together with appropriate observables which could be taken into consideration for their experimental characterization. The ultimate aim of the quantization procedure is the determination of fundamental quantities as the depletion of the condensate and the effective superfluid fraction, which are not accessible by a mean-field description or not completely characterized in the regime of strong interactions.
The present Thesis aims to deepen the understanding of the physics of strongly-correlated systems along diverse directions with a common denominator, namely a focus on the physical role played by the collective modes shaping quantum many-body correlations. This investigation has been mostly led through the heuristic application of the Quantum Gutzwiller Approach, a recently developed theory of the quantised excitations above the Gutzwiller approximation for strongly-interacting systems on a lattice. In the first place, the intertwining between quantum correlations and collective effects is explored in the context of Bose-Hubbard models, intended both as simple yet highly non-trivial realisations of complex many-body scenarios, and as controllable environments for the quantum simulation of impurity problems. In particular, we are able to provide a comprehensive and semi-analytical description of quantum fluctuations across the critical regimes induced by the proximity of a Mott transition (Mottness), ranging from accurate predictions for the superfluid density and pair correlations across quantum critical regimes to the Andreev-Bashkin effect in a two-component bosonic mixture. As case studies for the effectiveness and flexibility of our approach, we give a detailed account of the rich behaviours of a quantum impurity, either fixed or itinerant, immersed in a Bose-Hubbard environment, showing that both the decoherence dynamics of spinful particle and the resulting Bose polaron in the second case are extremely sensitive probes of the type of critical fluctuations experienced by the surrounding system. Additionally, we extend our analysis of quantum fluctuations to the Fermi-Hubbard model, where we uncover the interplay between low-energy quasiparticles and bosonic elementary excitations in determining two-particle correlations. A more complex physical scenario addressed in this Thesis is represented by driven-dissipative interacting systems, which find a state-of-the-art technological implementation in circuit QED platforms, among others. Inspired by the experimental interest in these systems as a potential toolbox for the generation of exotic quantum states of light, we consider a strongly-correlated fluid of photons on a lattice stabilised via incoherent drive and dissipation, and examine its collective fluctuations across the out-of-equilibrium insulator-to-superfluid transition of the system. Specifically, establishing a conceptual parallelism with our approach to fluctuations at equilibrium, we develop a linear-response theory of the excitations on top of the Gutzwiller stationary state of the Lindblad dynamics, and characterise their physical role in quantum observables and response functions. Taking advantage of our formalism, we describe also dynamical instabilities and novel physical regimes arising in the ultrastrong coupling limit of the superfluid phase. Among the most remarkable results, we bring to light the paradoxical nature of the Mott-like insulating phase of the system, whose peculiar one-body dynamical fluctuations are shown to echo the behaviour of a lasing state. Encompassing diverse modern domains of many-body physics, our investigation goes in the direction of solidifying the interpretation of collective modes as fundamental actors in correlation-induced phenomena under a unified physical picture.
We study the effects of quantum fluctuations in the two-component Bose-Hubbard model generalizing to mixtures the quantum Gutzwiller approach introduced recently in [Phys. Rev. Research 2, 033276 (2020)]. As a basis for our study, we analyze the mean-field ground-state phase diagram and spectrum of elementary excitations, with particular emphasis on the quantum phase transitions of the model. Within the quantum critical regimes, we address both the superfluid transport properties and the linear response dynamics to density and spin probes of direct experimental relevance. Crucially, we find that quantum fluctuations have a dramatic effect on the drag between the superfluid species of the system, particularly in the vicinity of the paired and antipaired phases absent in the usual one-component Bose-Hubbard model. Additionally, we analyse the contributions of quantum corrections to the one-body coherence and density/spin fluctuations from the perspective of the collective modes of the system, providing results for the few-body correlations in all the regimes of the phase diagram.
We present a strong-coupling expansion of the Bose-Hubbard model which describes both the superfluid and the Mott phases of ultracold bosonic atoms in an optical lattice. By performing two successive Hubbard-Stratonovich transformations of the intersite hopping term, we derive an effective action which provides a suitable starting point to study the strong-coupling limit of the Bose-Hubbard model. This action can be analyzed by taking into account Gaussian fluctuations about the mean-field approximation as in the Bogoliubov theory of the weakly interacting Bose gas. In the Mott phase, we reproduce results of previous mean-field theories and also calculate the momentum distribution function. In the superfluid phase, we find a gapless spectrum and compare our results with the Bogoliubov theory.
We present a generalized quasi-particle theory for bosonic lattice systems, which naturally contains all relevant collective modes, including the Higgs amplitude in the strongly correlated superfluid. In contrast to Bogoliubov theory, this non-perturbative method does not rely on a small condensate depletion and is valid for any interaction strength in three spatial dimensions. It is based on an expansion around the bosonic Gutzwiller ground state in terms of appropriately chosen fluctuation operators and lays the foundation for the description of real-time dynamics in terms of the natural, weakly interacting quasi-particles. Furthermore, it provides a systematic framework for efficiently calculating observables beyond the Gutzwiller approximation and for including external perturbations, as well as higher order decay and interactions in terms of quasi-particle operators. It allows for the construction of an alternative path integral approach in terms of quasi-particle coherent states.
For systems of interacting, ultracold spin-zero neutral bosonic atoms, harmonically trapped and subject to an optical lattice potential, we derive an Extended Bose Hubbard (EBH) model by developing a systematic expansion for the Hamiltonian of the system in powers of the lattice parameters and of a scale parameter, the lattice attenuation factor. We identify the dominant terms that need to be retained in realistic experimental conditions, up to nearest-neighbor interactions and nearest-neighbor hoppings conditioned by the on-site occupation numbers. In the mean field approximation, we determine the free energy of the system and study the phase diagram both at zero and at finite temperature. At variance with the standard on site Bose Hubbard model, the zero-temperature phase diagram of the EBH model possesses a dual structure in the Mott insulating regime. Namely, for specific ranges of the lattice parameters, a density wave phase characterizes the system at integer fillings, with domains of alternating mean occupation numbers that are the atomic counterparts of the domains of staggered magnetizations in an antiferromagnetic phase. We show as well that in the EBH model, a zero-temperature quantum phase transition to pair superfluidity is, in principle, possible, but completely suppressed at the lowest order in the lattice attenuation factor. Finally, we determine the possible occurrence of the different phases as a function of the experimentally controllable lattice parameters.
The dynamical evolution of a Bose-Einstein condensate trapped in a one-dimensional lattice potential is investigated theoretically in the framework of the Bose-Hubbard model. The emphasis is set on the far-from-equilibrium evolution in a case where the gas is strongly interacting. This is realized by an appropriate choice of the parameters in the Hamiltonian, and by starting with an initial state, where one lattice well contains a Bose-Einstein condensate while all other wells are empty. Oscillations of the condensate as well as noncondensate fractions of the gas between the different sites of the lattice are found to be damped as a consequence of the collisional interactions between the atoms. Functional integral techniques involving self-consistently determined mean fields as well as two-point correlation functions are used to derive the two-particle-irreducible (2PI) effective action. The action is expanded in inverse powers of the number of field components N, and the dynamic equations are derived from it to next-to-leading order in this expansion. This approach reaches considerably beyond the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov mean-field theory, and its results are compared to the exact quantum dynamics obtained by Rey et al. [Phys. Rev. A 69, 033610 (2004)] for small atom numbers.