Single-Particle Excitations in Mott Insulators

Khan W. Mahmud, Lei Jiang, Philip R. Johnson +1 more

Anonymous

Masanori Kohno

Peter Horsch, W. Stephan

Satoru Konabe, Tetsuro Nikuni, Masaaki Nakamura

We study single-particle excitations of a Bose gas in an optical lattice in the Mott-insulator phase. The characteristic feature of the single-particle spectrum in the Mott-insulator phase is the existence of an energy gap between the particle and hole excitations. We show that the single-particle excitation energies and associated energy gap in the Mott-insulator phase can be directly probed by an output-coupling experiment. We apply the general expression for the output current derived by Luxat and Griffin, which is given in terms of the single-particle Green's functions of a trapped Bose gas, to the Mott-insulator phase using the Bose-Hubbard model. The energy spectrum of the momentum-resolved output current exhibits two characteristic peaks corresponding to the particle and hole excitations, and thus it can be used to detect the transition point from the Mott insulator to superfluid phase where the energy gap disappears.

Masanori Kohno

An intuitive interpretation of the relationship between the dispersion relation of the single-particle excitation in a metal and that of the spin excitation in a Mott insulator is presented, based on the results for the one- and two-dimensional Hubbard models obtained by using the Bethe ansatz, dynamical density-matrix renormalization group method, and cluster perturbation theory. The dispersion relation of the spin excitation in the Mott insulator is naturally constructed from that of the single-particle excitation in the zero-doping limit in both one- and two-dimensional Hubbard models, which allows us to interpret the doping-induced states as the states that lose charge character toward the Mott transition. The characteristic feature of the Mott transition is contrasted with the feature of a Fermi liquid and that of the transition between a band insulator and a metal.