Clarifying similarities and differences in physical properties between crystalline and quasicrystalline systems is one of central issues in studying quasicrystals. To contribute to this, we apply multifractal and hyperuniform analyses to nonuniform spatial patterns in the Bose-Hubbard model on the Penrose and Ammann-Beenker tilings. Based on the mean-field approximation, we obtain real-space distributions of local superfluid amplitude and boson density. In both Mott insulating and superfluid phases, the distributions are hyperuniform. Analyzing the order metric that quantifies the complexity of nonuniform spatial patterns, we find that both quasicrystals show a significant increase of the order metric at a phase boundary between the Mott insulating and superfluid phases, in stark contrast to the case of a periodic square lattice. Our results suggest that hyperuniformity is a useful concept to differentiate between crystalline and quasicrystalline bosonic systems. The order metric clarifies if the distribution of a physical quantity reflects the point distribution or not, and quantifies how complex the distribution is in comparison with the point distribution. Moreover, we introduce on-site random potentials into these quasicrystalline Bose-Hubbard models, leading to a Bose glass phase. Contrary to the Mott insulating and superfluid phases, we find that the Bose glass phase is multifractal. The same multifractality appears on a Bose glass phase in the periodic square lattice. Therefore, multifractality is common in a Bose glass phase irrespective of the periodicity of systems.
Clarifying similarities and differences in physical properties between crystalline and quasicrystalline systems is one of central issues in studying quasicrystals. To contribute to this, we apply multifractal and hyperuniform analyses to nonuniform spatial patterns in the Bose-Hubbard model on the Penrose and Ammann-Beenker tilings. Based on the mean-field approximation, we obtain real-space distributions of local superfluid amplitude and boson density. In both Mott insulating and superfluid phases, the distributions are hyperuniform. Analyzing the order metric that quantifies the complexity of nonuniform spatial patterns, we find that both quasicrystals show a significant increase of the order metric at a phase boundary between the Mott insulating and superfluid phases, in stark contrast to the case of a periodic square lattice. Our results suggest that hyperuniformity is a useful concept to differentiate between crystalline and quasicrystalline bosonic systems. The order metric clarifies if the distribution of a physical quantity reflects the point distribution or not, and quantifies how complex the distribution is in comparison with the point distribution. Moreover, we introduce on-site random potentials into these quasicrystalline Bose-Hubbard models, leading to a Bose glass phase. Contrary to the Mott insulating and superfluid phases, we find that the Bose glass phase is multifractal. The same multifractality appears on a Bose glass phase in the periodic square lattice. Therefore, multifractality is common in a Bose glass phase irrespective of the periodicity of systems.
We study the ground state phases of the Bose-Hubbard model with disordered potentials for quasicrystalline systems, with a focus on the Bose-Glass phase. Generally speaking, disorder can lead to the formation of a Bose-Glass, which is characterised by the lack of global phase coherence across the lattice. Here, we will look at two models; the interacting 2D Aubry-Andre model and disordered vertex models from quasicrystalline tiling patterns. Unlike typical disorder in homogeneous, periodic systems, quasicrystalline models possess self-similarity. This leads to a fascinating interplay between correlated, quasiperiodic order and uncorrelated, random disorder. In this work, we combine Gutzwiller mean-field theory with a percolation analysis of superfluid clusters, allowing the critical points and phase regions of these disordered systems to be mapped. When the long-range order is separate to the random disorder, as is the case for the disordered vertex models, then the physics reflects that of periodic lattices with disorder. However, we find that long-range order present in the disorder term of the 2D Aubry-Andre model can result in some peculiarities to the physics of the Bose-Glass. These peculiarities include stabilisation from weak disorder lines and intricate, ordered structures of the phase itself that may provide fruitful areas of future study.
Abstract We confirm the presence of a mean-field Bose glass (BG) in 2D quasicrystalline Bose–Hubbard models. We focus on two models where the aperiodic component is present in different parts of the problem. First, we consider a 2D generalisation of the Aubry–André (AA) model, where the lattice geometry is that of a square with a quasiperiodic onsite potential. Second, we consider the randomly disordered vertex model, which takes aperiodic tilings with non-crystalline rotational symmetries, and forms lattices from the vertices and lengths of the tiles. For the disordered vertex models, the mean-field BG forms across large ranges of the chemical potential, and we observe no significant differences from the case of a square lattice with uniform random disorder. Small variations in the critical points in the presence of random disorder between quasicrystalline and crystalline lattice geometries can be accounted for by the varying coordination number and the different rotational symmetries present. In the 2D AA model, substantial differences are observed from the usual phase diagrams of crystalline disordered systems. We show that weak modulation lines can be predicted from the underlying potential and may stabilise or suppress the mean-field BG in certain regimes. This results in a lobe-like structure for the mean-field BG in the 2D AA model, which is significantly different from the case of random disorder. Together, the two quasicrystalline models studied in this work show that the mean-field BG phase is present, as expected for 2D quasiperiodic models. However, a quasicrystalline geometry is not sufficient to result in differences from crystalline realisations of the BG, whereas a quasiperiodic form of disorder can result in different physics, as we observe in the 2D AA model.
We study the local density of the Bose-Hubbard model in the presence of on-site disorder near the Bose-glass transition using multifractal, typical medium, and percolation theories. At incommensurate filling our findings support the scenario of percolating superfluid clusters enhancing Anderson localization. Scaling analysis of the superfluid density at the incommensurate filling of $\ensuremath{\rho}=1.1$ and on-site interaction U=80t predicts a superfluid-Bose-glass transition at disorder strength of ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}}_{c}\ensuremath{\approx}30t$. At this filling the local-density distribution becomes more skew with increasing disorder strength. Multifractal analysis suggests a multifractal behavior resembling that of the Anderson localization. In the Bose-glass phase the mode of the local-density distribution approaches an integer value as expected from typical medium theory for the Anderson localization. Percolation analysis points to a phase transition of percolating noninteger filled sites around the same value of disorder. On the other hand, the behavior at commensurate filling is rather different. Close to the tip of the Mott lobe ($\ensuremath{\rho}=1,U=22t$) we find a Mott-insulator-Bose-glass transition at disorder strength of ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}}_{c}\ensuremath{\approx}16t$. An analysis of the local-density distribution shows Gaussian-like behavior for a wide range of disorders above and below the transition.
We examine the Bose-Hubbard model in the Penrose lattice based on inhomogeneous mean-field theory. Since the averaged coordination number in the Penrose lattice is four, the mean-field phase diagram consisting of the Mott insulator (MI) and superfluid (SF) phase is similar to that of the square lattice. However, the spatial distribution of the Bose condensate in the SF phase is significantly different from uniform distribution in the square lattice. We find a fractal structure in its distribution near the MI-SF phase boundary. The emergence of the fractal structure is a consequence of the cooperative effect between quasiperiodicity in the Penrose lattice and criticality at the phase transition.
This thesis concerns the physics of ultracold bosons in quasicrystalline lattices, studied by means of quantum simulation using ultracold 39K atoms loaded to an eight-fold rotationally symmetric optical quasicrystal. Quasicrystalline and quasiperiodic systems, thanks to their long-range order and lack of periodicity, exhibit a wealth of interesting properties such as a dense and self-similar momentum space, and a localization transition to Anderson insulator or Bose glass states (in non-interacting or interacting cases respectively) reminiscent of that in disordered systems, whilst lacking the rare regions that typically exist in such systems. Here we will cover experiments into this system’s behaviour in both equilibrium and non-equilibrium settings. First, we focus on mapping out its phase diagram in both weakly and strongly interacting regimes. We observe consistency with numerical predictions for the superfluid-Bose glass phase transition using coherence measurements, as well as finding a region of roughly zero compressibility around where the numerics predicts the existence of a Mott insulator ground state. We also study which regimes of the phase diagram can be ramped through adiabatically, finding that entropy is created upon traversing the Bose glass phase irrespective of ramp duration, which we attribute to its localized nature. Next we look into the dynamics of the system after a quench of the lattice depth in the weakly interacting regime. Upon quenching from the superfluid regime to the Bose glass regime, we observe a quantum walk to higher order diffraction peaks in momentum space whose maximum order is unbounded by kinetic energy thanks to the dense, self-similar nature of the quasicrystal’s momentum space. Quenching in the opposite direction we observe instead a walk between sites in real space for short times by looking at the position (as opposed to momentum) space autocorrelation function of the cloud, finding an expansion rate in agreement with an intuitive estimate based on the Lieb-Robinson bounds of a periodic system. We also look into the timescales of these dynamics in the context of what we might expect from the underlying Hamiltonian, before finally investigating the loss of coherence exhibited by the system after a slower quench of the lattice depth from an initially superfluid cloud. We observe that coherence is lost sooner after the quench for deeper final lattices, with the loss becoming almost instantaneous for quenches that cross the localization transition across the whole cloud. After this we explore the system’s transport dynamics by means of a quench to an excited state at the same time as an additional confining potential is switched off. We observe that unlike in the case of a periodic square lattice, where ballistic expansion that scales with the tunnelling strength occurs in the non-interacting case before becoming slower upon the introduction of interactions thanks to diffusion, in the quasicrystal the transport rate no longer scales with tunnelling strength. Instead we observe a drop relative to the tunnelling rate by 2 − 3 orders of magnitude as the lattice depth is increased from 1Er to 5Er with little dependence on the interaction strength. We also note that the finite rate measured for the deeper lattices is potentially an overestimate since the finite loss rate of atoms makes mass transport indistinguishable from density-dependent losses at that point. Finally, we discuss use of a quantum gas magnification scheme with which to magnify the real space density distribution of our atoms such that it can be measured with single-site resolution. Some preliminary results are presented regarding how the density distribution changes with lattice depth in the weakly interacting regime, in which we observe that as lattice depth increases a higher proportion of atoms occupy deeper sites close to the centre of the quasicrystal’s configuration space, as we might expect.
The Bose glass (BG) phase is the Griffiths region of the disordered Bose–Hubbard model (BHM), characterized by finite, quasi-superfluid clusters within a Mott insulating background. We propose to utilize this characterization to identify the complete zero-temperature phase diagram of the disordered BHM in d ⩾ 2 dimensions by analysing the geometric properties of what we call superfluid (SF) clusters, which are defined to be clusters of sites with non-integer expectation values for the local boson occupation number. The Mott insulator phase then is the region in the phase diagram where no SF clusters exist, and the SF phase the region where SF clusters percolate—the BG phase is inbetween: SF clusters exist, but do not percolate. This definition is particularly useful in the context of local mean field (LMF) or Gutzwiller–Ansatz calculations, where we show that an identification of the phases on the basis of global quantities such as the averaged SF order parameter and the compressibility is misleading. We apply the SF cluster analysis to the LMF ground states of the two-dimensional disordered BHM to produce its phase diagram and find (a) an excellent agreement with the phase diagram predicted on the basis of quantum Monte Carlo simulations for the commensurate density n = 1 and (b) large differences to stochastic mean field and other mean field predictions for fixed disorder strength. The relation of the percolation transition of the SF clusters with the onset of non-vanishing SF stiffness indicating the BG to SF transition is discussed.