A semiclassical study of the topological Bose-Hubbard model
S. A. Owerre
Abstract
We present a semiclassical perspective of the topological Bose-Hubbard model recently studied by quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulation on the honeycomb lattice [Phys. Rev. B 93, 121401(R) (2016)]. The three insulating phases uncovered by QMC are as follows: a superfluid, a Mott phase, and a charge-density-wave insulating phase. We show that this model maps to a spin-$1/2$ quantum XY model with competing magnetic fields on the two honeycomb sublattices. We give an explicit analytical origin of the quantum phase diagram using mean-field theory. Basically, the competition between the sublattice magnetic fields leads to three distinct phases uncovered by QMC. We find that the mean-field phase diagram captures a large regime of the quantum phase diagram. Furthermore, due to the mapping from bosons to spin variables and vice versa, the bosonic excitations of the Bose-Hubbard model correspond to the magnon excitations of the quantum spin system. We corroborate this assertion by computing the magnon bulk bands and the Berry curvatures and we find that the Berry curvatures have the same trends as the QMC result.