We address the discrimination between attractive and repulsive interaction in systems made of two identical bosons propagating on a one-dimensional lattice, and suggest a probing scheme exploiting the dynamical properties of the corresponding two-particle quantum walks. In particular, we show that the sign of the interaction leaves a clear signature in the dynamics of the two walkers, which is governed by the Hubbard model, and in their quantum correlations, thus permitting one to discriminate between the two cases. We also prove that these features are strictly connected to the band structure of the Hubbard Hamiltonian.
The quantum dynamics of one-dimensional bosonic Josephson junctions with attractive and repulsive interparticle interactions is studied by using the Bose-Hubbard model and by numerically exact computations of the full many-body Hamiltonian. A symmetry present in the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian dictates an equivalence between the evolution in time of the survival probability and the fragmentation of attractive and repulsive Josephson junctions with attractive and repulsive interactions of equal magnitude. The full many-body Hamiltonian does not possess this symmetry and, consequently, the dynamics of the attractive and repulsive junctions are different.
Some exact results are given, that connect, for a general magnitude of the interaction term U , the repulsive and attractive Hubbard models, in terms of the eigenspectra and quantum diffusion properties. In particular, it is shown that, for some initial conditions, the quantum evolution cannot differentiate between the attractive and repulsive models. These results apply to both fermionic and bosonic models, in any dimension and for general filling, as far as the underlying structure is bi-partite.
We discuss the phase diagram of the extended Hubbard model with both attractive and repulsive local and nonlocal interactions. The extended dynamical mean-field theory (EDMFT) and the dual boson method (DB) are compared. The latter contains additional nonlocal correlation effects that are not incorporated in EDMFT. We find that EDMFT and DB give almost identical results in the attractive V regime, where phase separation occurs. This is quite a difference with the previously studied repulsive V regime, where EDMFT and DB give very different phase boundaries for the checkerboard order phase, especially at small U .
In this paper we address the behavior of the superfluid transition temperature
Tc in the attractive Hubbard model. The attractive Hubbard model can be regarded as the generalization of the BCS to Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) crossover to a lattice and, as such, may have implications for future optical lattice studies. Nevertheless, the BEC limit of the Hubbard model is very different from that of the better-studied Fermi gases, owing to the strong intersite repulsion between pairs. Here we address systematically the effects of pairing fluctuations for all filling fractions over the entire range of attractive interaction strength. A central conclusion of our work is that in a lattice, around half filling, the smooth evolution from the BCS to the BEC limits is interrupted:
Tc vanishes when the system approaches the bosonic regime with increasing interaction strength. We suggest that this interruption of crossover may signal a quantum critical transition to another form of superfluid not continuously connected to a BCS-like phase. A simple variational ansatz for an alternate ground state in this more strongly coupled superfluid is presented. A generalization of the (
s-wave) Hubbard model to
d-wave pairing allows us to address issues of relevance to high-
Tc superconductivity. The phase diagram (representing the pairing or pseudogap onset temperature
T∗ and
Tc) shows that here too one observes a vanishing of
Tc when
T∗ becomes sufficiently large. Given this predicted breakdown of the crossover, and given the striking similarity to features of the cuprate phase diagram, we suggest that future experiments on ultracold fermions in optical lattices should not be exclusively limited to the repulsive Hubbard model, but should address the attractive model in order to elucidate features of high-temperature superconductivity.