Spectral properties of the Bose-Hubbard model and a recently proposed coupled-cavity model are studied by means of quantum Monte Carlo simulations in one dimension. Both models exhibit a quantum phase transition from a Mott insulator to a superfluid phase. The dynamic structure factor $S(k,\ensuremath{\omega})$ and the single-particle spectrum $A(k,\ensuremath{\omega})$ are calculated, focusing on the parameter region around the phase transition from the Mott insulator with density one to the superfluid phase, where correlations are important. The strongly interacting nature of the superfluid phase manifests itself in terms of additional gapped modes in the spectra. Comparison is made to recent analytical work on the Bose-Hubbard model. Despite some subtle differences due to the polaritonic particles in the cavity model, the gross features are found to be very similar to the Bose-Hubbard case. For the polariton model, emergent particle-hole symmetry near the Mott lobe tip is demonstrated and temperature and detuning effects are analyzed. A scaling analysis for the generic transition suggests mean-field exponents, in accordance with field-theory results.
We obtain the excitation spectra of the following three generalized Bose-Hubbard (BH) models: (1) a two-species generalization of the spinless BH model, (2) a single-species, spin-1 BH model, and (3) the extended Bose-Hubbard model (EBH) for spinless interacting bosons of one species. In all the phases of these models we provide a unified treatment of random-phase-approximation (RPA) excitation spectra. These spectra have gaps in all the MI phases and gaps in the DW phases in the EBH model; they are gapless in all the SF phases in these models and in the SS phases in the EBH model. We obtain the dependence of (a) gaps
Δ and (b) the sound velocity
us on the parameters of these models and examine
Δ and
us as these systems go through phase transitions. At the SF-MI transitions in the spin-1 BH model,
us goes to zero continuously (discontinuously) for MI phases with an odd (even) number of bosons per site; this is consistent with the natures of these transition in mean-field theory. In the SF phases of these models, our excitation spectra agree qualitatively, at weak couplings, with those that can be obtained from Gross-Pitaevskii-type models. We compare the results of our work with earlier studies of related models and discuss implications for experiments.
The density matrix renormalization group algorithm is used to characterize the ground states of one-dimensional coupled cavities in the regime of low photon densities. Numerical results for photon and spin excitation densities, one- and two-body correlation functions, superfluid and condensate fractions, as well as the entanglement entropy and localizable entanglement are obtained for the Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard (JCH) model and are compared with those for the Bose-Hubbard (BH) model where applicable. The results indicate that a Tonks-Girardeau phase, in which the photons are strongly fermionized, appears between the Mott-insulating and superfluid phases as a function of the intercavity coupling. In fact, the superfluid density is found to be zero in a wide region outside the Mott-insulator phase boundary. The presence of two different species of excitation (spin and photon) in the JCH model gives rise to properties with no analog in the BH model, such as the (quasi)condensation of spin excitations and the spontaneous generation of entanglement between the atoms confined to each cavity.