The Bose-Hubbard model with disorder in low-dimensional lattices

Xiao Zhang

Fei Lin, ShengQuan Zhou, Matthew Pasienski +2 more

Juan Carrasquilla, Federico Becca, Andrea Trombettoni +1 more

We study by numerical simulation a disordered Bose-Hubbard model in low-dimensional lattices. We show that a proper characterization of the phase diagram on finite disordered clusters requires the knowledge of probability distributions of physical quantities rather than their averages. This holds in particular for determining the stability region of the Bose-glass phase, the compressible but not superfluid phase that exists whenever disorder is present. This result suggests that a similar statistical analysis should be performed also to interpret experiments on cold gases trapped in disordered lattices, limited as they are to finite sizes.

Bruno Ricardi de Abreu

Pierfrancesco Buonsante, Francesco Massel, Vittorio Penna +1 more

Recently it has been suggested that fermions whose hopping amplitude is quenched to extremely low values provide a convenient source of local disorder for lattice bosonic systems realized in current experiment on ultracold atoms. Here we investigate the phase diagram of such systems, which provide the experimental realization of a Bose-Hubbard model whose local potentials are randomly extracted from a binary distribution. Adopting a site-dependent Gutzwiller description of the state of the system, we address one- and two-dimensional lattices and obtain results agreeing with previous findings, as far as the compressibility of the system is concerned. We discuss the expected peaks in the experimental excitation spectrum of the system, related to the incompressible phases, and the superfluid character of the partially compressible regions characterizing the phase diagram of systems with binary disorder. In our investigation we make use of several analytical results whose derivation is described in appendixes, and whose validity is not limited to the system under concern.

R. T. Scalettar, M. Ulmke