This thesis is devoted to the study of the effect of disorder on low-dimensional weakly interacting Bose gases. In particular, the disorder triggers a quantum phase transition in one dimension at zero temperature that is investigated here through the study of the long-range behaviour of the one-body density matrix. An algebraic spatial decay of the coherence marks the quasicondensate, whereas, in the case of strong disorder, an exponential decay is recovered and it characterizes the insulating Bose-glass phase. This analysis is performed using an extended Bogoliubov theory to treat low dimensional Bose gases within a density-phase approach. A systematic numerical study allowed to draw the phase diagram of 1D weakly interacting bosons. The phase boundary obeys two different power laws between interaction and disorder strength depending on the regime of the gas where the transition occurs. These relations can be explained by means of scaling arguments valid in the white noise limit and in the Thomas-Fermi regime of the Bose gas. The phase transition to a quasicondensed phase comes along with the onset of superfluidity: the inspection of the superfluid fraction of the gas is consistent with these predictions for the boundary. The finite temperature case and the scenario in two dimensions are briefly discussed. The quantum phase transition is caused by low-energy phase fluctuations that destroy the quasi-long-range order characterizing the uniform system. Within the approach presented here, the phase fluctuations are identified as the low-lying Bogoliubov modes. Their properties have been investigated in detail to understand which changes trigger the phase transition and we found that the transition to the insulating phase is accompanied by a diverging density of states and a localization length, measured through the inverse participation ratio, that diverges as a power-law with power – 1 for vanishing energy. The fragmentation of the gas is also studied: this notion is very often associated with the onset of the insulating phase. The characterization of the density fragmentation is performed by analyzing the probability distribution of the density. A density profile is defined as fragmented when the probability distribution at vanishing density is finite or divergent and this happens for a gas in the Bose-glass phase. On the contrary, the superfluid phase is characterized by a zero limiting probability of having vanishing densities. This definition is derived analytically, and confirmed by a numerical study. This fragmentation criterion is particularly suited for detecting the phase transition in experiments: when a harmonic trap is included, the transition to the insulating phase can be extracted from the statistics of the local density distribution.
This thesis is devoted to the study of the effect of disorder on low-dimensional weakly interacting Bose gases. In particular, the disorder triggers a quantum phase transition in one dimension at zero temperature that is investigated here through the study of the long-range behaviour of the one-body density matrix. An algebraic spatial decay of the coherence marks the quasicondensate, whereas, in the case of strong disorder, an exponential decay is recovered and it characterizes the insulating Bose-glass phase. This analysis is performed using an extended Bogoliubov theory to treat low dimensional Bose gases within a density-phase approach. A systematic numerical study allowed to draw the phase diagram of 1D weakly interacting bosons. The phase boundary obeys two different power laws between interaction and disorder strength depending on the regime of the gas where the transition occurs. These relations can be explained by means of scaling arguments valid in the white noise limit and in the Thomas-Fermi regime of the Bose gas. The phase transition to a quasicondensed phase comes along with the onset of superfluidity: the inspection of the superfluid fraction of the gas is consistent with these predictions for the boundary. The finite temperature case and the scenario in two dimensions are briefly discussed. The quantum phase transition is caused by low-energy phase fluctuations that destroy the quasi-long-range order characterizing the uniform system. Within the approach presented here, the phase fluctuations are identified as the low-lying Bogoliubov modes. Their properties have been investigated in detail to understand which changes trigger the phase transition and we found that the transition to the insulating phase is accompanied by a diverging density of states and a localization length, measured through the inverse participation ratio, that diverges as a power-law with power – 1 for vanishing energy. The fragmentation of the gas is also studied: this notion is very often associated with the onset of the insulating phase. The characterization of the density fragmentation is performed by analyzing the probability distribution of the density. A density profile is defined as fragmented when the probability distribution at vanishing density is finite or divergent and this happens for a gas in the Bose-glass phase. On the contrary, the superfluid phase is characterized by a zero limiting probability of having vanishing densities. This definition is derived analytically, and confirmed by a numerical study. This fragmentation criterion is particularly suited for detecting the phase transition in experiments: when a harmonic trap is included, the transition to the insulating phase can be extracted from the statistics of the local density distribution.
In this thesis, we study the quantum phase transition triggered by an external random po- tential in ultra-cold low-dimensional weakly-interacting Bose gases at zero temperature. In one-dimensional systems, the quantum phases are characterized by the decay at long-range of the one-body density matrix. This decay exhibits an algebraic behaviour in the superfluid quasi-condensed phase while in the insulating Bose glass phase this it becomes exponen- tial, signaling the complete loss of coherence in the system. In two-dimensional systems, a characterization based on the long-range behaviour of the one-body density matrix appears to be highly demanding from a computational point of view. We therefore characterized the superfluid-insulator transition in two-dimensional systems by the low-energy behaviour of the cumulative density of states of the Bogoliubov excitations. While in the superfluid condensed phase this quantity grows as the square of the excitation energy in agreement with the existence of a finite velocity of sound, in the insulating Bose glass phase this power law is less than quadratic. This study is performed in the framework of an extended Bogoliubov approach properly adapted to treat low-dimensional Bose gases. Using a systematic numerical study, we draw the interaction-disorder phase diagrams of the superfluid-insulator transition in 1D and 2D. The phase boundary follows two different power- laws depending on the length scales characterizing the spatial correlations of the disorder and the strength of interactions. The power-law exponents were found to be in agreement with the ones predicted by scaling arguments, both in the white noise and the Thomas-Fermi regimes. In the two-dimensional system, the classical percolation threshold in the Thomas-Fermi limit was found to overestimate the critical disorder below which the onset of superfluidity should be observed for a given interaction strength.
We study the quantum phase transition of the 1D weakly interacting Bose gas in the presence of disorder. We characterize the phase transition as a function of disorder and interaction strengths, by inspecting the long-range behavior of the one-body density matrix as well as the drop in the superfluid fraction. We focus on the properties of the low-energy Bogoliubov excitations that drive the phase transition and find that the transition to the insulator state is marked by a diverging density of states and a localization length that diverges as a power-law with power 1. We draw the phase diagram and we observe that the boundary between the superfluid and the insulator phase is characterized by two different algebraic relations. These can be explained analytically by considering the limiting cases of zero and infinite disorder correlation length.
We study the one-dimensional Bose gas in spatially correlated disorder at zero temperature, using an extended density-phase Bogoliubov method. We analyze, in particular, the decay of the one-body density matrix and the behavior of the Bogoliubov excitations across the phase boundary. We observe that the transition to the Bose-glass phase is marked by a power-law divergence of the density of states at low energy. A measure of the localization length displays a power-law energy dependence in both regions, with the exponent equal to -1 at the boundary. We draw the phase diagram of the superfluid-insulator transition in the limit of small interaction strength.
We investigate the superfluid-insulator quantum phase transition in a disordered one-dimensional Bose gas in the mean-field limit by studying the probability distribution of the density. The superfluid phase is characterized by a vanishing probability to have zero density, whereas a nonzero probability marks the insulator phase. This relation is derived analytically and confirmed by a numerical study. This fragmentation criterion is particularly suited for detecting the phase transition in experiments. When a harmonic trap is included, the transition to the insulating phase can be extracted from the statistics of the local density distribution.
We study the two-dimensional weakly repulsive Bose gas at zero temperature in the presence of correlated disorder. Using large-scale simulations, we show that the low-energy Bogoliubov cumulative density of states remains quadratic up to a critical disorder strength, beyond which a power law with disorder-dependent exponent $\ensuremath{\beta}<2$ sets in. We associate this threshold behavior with the transition from superfluid to Bose glass, and compare the resulting mean-field phase diagram with scaling laws and the Thomas-Fermi percolation threshold of the mean-field density profile.
Weakly interacting Bose gases in a disorder environment have long been a challenging topic in the field of solid-state physics due to the intriguing interplay between superfluidity and localization. In this thesis we investigate theoretically the equilibrium properties of one- and three-dimensional harmonically trapped dirty Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). In particular we focus on the decomposition of the total particle density into three components, namely, the condensate density, the thermal density, and the density of fragmented local Bose-Einstein condensates within the respective minima of the random potential landscape. In order to determine the different density components we develop a Hartree-Fock mean-field theory for a weakly interacting trapped BEC in a random environment, then specialize it to contact interaction and delta-correlated disorder. This non-perturbative theory is worked out on the basis of the replica method, which represents a well- established tool to deal with disorder problems. With this we calculate the corresponding free energy at finite temperature and derive from it the underlying self-consistency equations for the respective density components. Then, as a first step, we investigate a quasi one-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensed gas in a harmonic trapping potential with an additional delta- correlated disorder potential at zero temperature. To this end we solve the self-consistency equations within the Thomas-Fermi approximation and find the emergence of a Bose-glass region, where the condensate vanishes. We corroborate this analysis by an elaborate numerical treatment, where the corresponding one-dimensional time-independent Gross-Pitaevskii equation is numerically solved and disorder-ensemble averages of the condensate wave function are performed. The variance of the condensate wave function quantifies the number of bosons which condense in the local minima of the random potential. For weak disorder these mini-condensates turn out to occur preferentially at the border of the condensate, while for intermediate disorder strength this happens in the trap center. Additionally we use a variational ansatz in order to describe analytically the numerically observed redistribution of the fragmented mini-condensates with increasing disorder strength. In close analogy to the one-dimensional case we then treat the three-dimensional dirty Bose gas in an isotropic harmonic trap and a delta- correlated disorder potential at zero temperature using the corresponding self-consistency equations obtained via the Hartree-Fock mean-field theory within the Thomas-Fermi approximation. Additionally we use a variational ansatz, whose results turn out to coincide qualitatively with those obtained from the Thomas-Fermi approximation. Inparticular, a first order quantum phase transition from the superfluid phase, where the condensate density contributes to the total density, to the Bose-glass phase, where all particles are in the mini-condensates, is detected at a critical disorder strength, which agrees with findings in the literature. Furthermore, in a generaltriaxial harmonic trap, we investigate the geometric effect of different trap aspect ratios on the respective properties of the dirty BEC system. Finally, we consider the three- dimensional dirty BEC at finite temperature. This allows us to study the impact of both temperature and disorder fluctuations on the respective components of the density as well as their Thomas-Fermi radii. In particular, we find that the superfluid region, the Bose-glass region, and the thermal region coexist. Furthermore, depending on the system parameters, three phase transitions are detected, namely, one from the superfluid to the Bose-glass phase, one from the Boseglass to the thermal phase, and finally one directly from the superfluid to the thermal phase. All these results could be particularly useful for a quantitative analysis of world-wide on-going experiments with dirty bosons in quasi one-dimensional and three-dimensional harmonic traps.