This chapter finally moves beyond the quantum rotor models which have been the complete focus of our attention so far in Part II. Our motivation is two-fold: to introduce the coherent state path integral, which plays an important role in developing the field theory for many interesting quantum phase transitions; and to provide a deeper and more complete explanation of our claimed connection between the N = 2 rotor model and the experiments on ultracold bosonic atoms in an optical lattice which was claimed in Sections 1.3 and 1.4.3. We do this by studying the boson Hubbard model, which has a direct connection to the microscopic Hamiltonian of the ultracold atoms. The Hubbard model was originally introduced as a description of the motion of electrons in transition metals, with the motivation of understanding their magnetic properties. This original model remains a very active subject of research today, and important progress has been made in recent years by examining its properties in the limit of large spatial dimensionality [160, 165]. In this chapter, we examine only the much simpler “boson Hubbard model,” following the analysis in an important paper by Fisher et al. [148]. As the name implies, the elementary degrees of freedom in this model are spinless bosons, which take the place of the spin-1/2 fermionic electrons in the original Hubbard model. These bosons could represent Cooper pairs of electrons undergoing Josephson tunneling between superconducting islands, helium atoms moving on a substrate, or ultracold atoms in an optical lattice.
This chapter finally moves beyond the quantum rotor models which have been the complete focus of our attention so far in Part II. Our motivation is two-fold: to introduce the coherent state path integral, which plays an important role in developing the field theory for many interesting quantum phase transitions; and to provide a deeper and more complete explanation of our claimed connection between the N = 2 rotor model and the experiments on ultracold bosonic atoms in an optical lattice which was claimed in Sections 1.3 and 1.4.3. We do this by studying the boson Hubbard model, which has a direct connection to the microscopic Hamiltonian of the ultracold atoms. The Hubbard model was originally introduced as a description of the motion of electrons in transition metals, with the motivation of understanding their magnetic properties. This original model remains a very active subject of research today, and important progress has been made in recent years by examining its properties in the limit of large spatial dimensionality [160, 165]. In this chapter, we examine only the much simpler “boson Hubbard model,” following the analysis in an important paper by Fisher et al. [148]. As the name implies, the elementary degrees of freedom in this model are spinless bosons, which take the place of the spin-1/2 fermionic electrons in the original Hubbard model. These bosons could represent Cooper pairs of electrons undergoing Josephson tunneling between superconducting islands, helium atoms moving on a substrate, or ultracold atoms in an optical lattice.
The Hubbard model was originally introduced as a description of the motion of electrons in transition metals, with the motivation of understanding their magnetic properties. This original model remains a very active subject of research today, and important progress has been made in recent years by examining its properties in the limit of large spatial dimensionality. In this chapter, we shall only examine the much simpler “boson Hubbard model,” following the analysis in an important paper by Fisher, Weichman, Grinstein, and Fisher. As the name implies, the elementary degrees of freedom in this model are spinless bosons, which take the place of the spin-½ fermionic electrons in the original model. These bosons could represent Cooper pairs of electrons undergoing Josephson tunneling between super conducting islands or helium atoms moving on a substrate. Processes in which the Cooper pair boson decays into a pair of electrons are neglected in this simple model, and this caveat must be kept in mind while discussing experimental applications. Many of the results discussed in this chapter were also obtained in early literature on quantum transitions in anisotropic magnets in the presence of an applied magnetic field. These are reviewed by Kaganov and Chubukov, who also gave an extensive discussion of experimental applications. We will, however, not use their formulation here. Apart from its direct physical applications, the importance of the boson Hubbard model lies in providing one of the simplest realizations of a quantum phase transition that does not map onto a previously studied classical phase transition in one higher dimension.
The Chapter 2 is devoted to the study of the transport properties of a quantum wire, described by the Tomonaga-Luttinger model, in the presence of a backscattering potential provided by several point-like or extended time-dependent impurities (barriers) and find regimes of conductance enhancement. In Chapte 3 we study a set of crossed 1D systems, which are coupled with each other via tunnelling at the crossings. Concentrating on the case of a single crossing, we were able to explain recent experiments on crossed metallic and semiconducting nanotubes, which showed the presence of localized states in the region of crossing. The Chapter 4 treats the effects of disorder and interactions in a quantum Hall ferromagnet. We study the problem by projecting the original fermionic Hamiltonian into magnon states, which behave as bosons in the vicinity of the ferromagnetic ground state. The approach permits the reformulation of a strongly interacting model into a non-interacting one. The latter is a non-perturbative scheme that consists in treating the two-particle neutral excitations of the electron system as a bosonic single-particle. Indeed, the employment of bosonization facilitates the inclusion of disorder in the study of the system. It has been shown previously that disorder may drive a quantum phase transition in the Hall ferromagnet. However, such studies have been either carried out in the framework of the nonlinear sigma model, as an effective low-energy theory, or included the long-range Coulomb interaction in a quantum description only up to the Hartree-Fock level. Here, we establish the occurrence of a disorder-driven quantum phase transition from a ferromagnetic 2DEG to a spin glass phase by taking into account interactions between electrons up to the random phase approximation level in a fully quantum description. In the Chapter 5 we derive and discuss an experimentally realistic model describing ultracold atoms in an optical lattice including a commensurate, but staggered, Zeeman field. The resulting band structure is quite exotic; fermions in the third band have an unusual rounded picture-frame Fermi surface (essentially two concentric squircles), leading to imperfect nesting. We develop a generalized theory describing the spin and charge degrees of freedom simultaneously, and show that the system can develop a coupled spin-charge-density wave order. This ordering is absent in studies of the Hubbard model that treat spin and charge density separately.
Originally, the Hubbard model was derived for describing the behavior of strongly correlated electrons in solids. However, for over a decade now, variations of it have also routinely been implemented with ultracold atoms in optical lattices, allowing their study in a clean, essentially defect-free environment. Here, we review some of the vast literature on this subject, with a focus on more recent non-standard forms of the Hubbard model. After giving an introduction to standard (fermionic and bosonic) Hubbard models, we discuss briefly common models for mixtures, as well as the so-called extended Bose-Hubbard models, that include interactions between neighboring sites, next-neighbor sites, and so on. The main part of the review discusses the importance of additional terms appearing when refining the tight-binding approximation for the original physical Hamiltonian. Even when restricting the models to the lowest Bloch band is justified, the standard approach neglects the density-induced tunneling (which has the same origin as the usual on-site interaction). The importance of these contributions is discussed for both contact and dipolar interactions. For sufficiently strong interactions, the effects related to higher Bloch bands also become important even for deep optical lattices. Different approaches that aim at incorporating these effects, mainly via dressing the basis, Wannier functions with interactions, leading to effective, density-dependent Hubbard-type models, are reviewed. We discuss also examples of Hubbard-like models that explicitly involve higher p orbitals, as well as models that dynamically couple spin and orbital degrees of freedom. Finally, we review mean-field nonlinear Schrödinger models of the Salerno type that share with the non-standard Hubbard models nonlinear coupling between the adjacent sites. In that part, discrete solitons are the main subject of consideration. We conclude by listing some open problems, to be addressed in the future.
This dissertation discusses a number of theoretical models of coupled bosonic modes, all closely related to the Bose-Hubbard dimer. In studying these models, we will repeatedly return to two unifying themes: the classical structure underlying quantum dynamics and the impact of weakly coupling a system to an environment. Or, more succinctly, semiclassical methods and open quantum systems. \n \nOur primary motivation for studying models such as the Bose-Hubbard is their relevance to ongoing ultracold atom experiments. We review these experiments, derive the Bose-Hubbard model in their context and briefly discuss its limitations in the first half of Chapter 1. In its second half, we review the theory of open quantum systems and the master equation description of the dissipative Bose-Hubbard model. This opening chapter constitutes a survey of existing results, rather than original work. \n \nIn Chapter 2, we turn to the mean-field limit of the Bose-Hubbard model. After reviewing the striking localization phenomena predicted by the mean-field (and confirmed by experiment), we identify the first corrections to this picture for the dimer. The most interesting of these is the dynamical tunneling between the self-trapping points of the mean-field. We derive an accurate analytical expression for the tunneling rate using semiclassical techniques. \n \nWe continue studying the dynamics near the self-trapping fixed points in Chapter 3, focusing on corrections to the mean-field that arise at larger nonlinearities and on shorter time scales than dynamical tunneling. We study the impact of dissipation on coherence and entanglement near the fixed points, and explain it in terms of the structure of the classical phase space. \n \nThe last chapter of the dissertation is also devoted to a dissipative bosonic dimer model, but one arising in a very different physical context. Abandoning optical lattices, we consider the problem of formulating a quantum model of operation of the cylindrical anode magnetron, a vacuum tube crossed-field microwave amplifier. We derive an effective dissipative dimer model and study its relationship to the classical description. Our dimer model is a first step towards the analysis of solid-state analogs of such devices.
Originally, the Hubbard model has been derived for describing the behaviour of strongly-correlated electrons in solids. However, since over a decade now, variations of it are also routinely being imple-mented with ultracold atoms in optical lattices, allowing their study in a clean, essentially defect-free environment. Here, we review some of the rich literature on this subject, with a focus on more recent non-standard forms of the Hubbard model. After an introduction to standard (fermionic and bosonic) Hubbard models, we discuss briefly common models for mixtures, as well as the so called extended Bose-Hubbard models, that include interactions between neighboring sites, next-neighboring sites, and so on. The main part of the review discusses the importance of additional terms appearing when refining the tight-binding approximation on the original physical Hamiltonian. Even when restricting the models to the lowest Bloch band is justified, the standard approach neglects the density-induced tunneling (which has the same origin as the usual on-site interaction). The importance of these contri-
The past decade has seen a substantial rejuvenation of interest in the study of quantum phase transitions, driven by experiments on cuprate superconductors, heavy fermion materials, organic conductors, and related compounds. Although quantum phase transitions in simple spin systems, like the Ising model in a transverse field, were studied in the early 1970s, much of the subsequent theoretical work examined a particular example: the metal–insulator transition. While this is a subject of considerable experimental importance, the greatest theoretical progress was made for the case of the Anderson transition of non-interacting electrons, which is driven by localization of the electronic states in the presence of a random potential. The critical properties of this transition of noninteracting electrons constituted the primary basis upon which most condensed matter physicists have formed their intuition on the behavior of the systems near a quantum phase transition. However, it is clear that strong electronic interactions play a crucial role in the systems of current interest noted earlier, and simple paradigms for the behavior of such systems near quantum critical points are not widely known. It is the purpose of this book to move interactions to center stage by describing and classifying the physical properties of the simplest interacting systems undergoing a quantum phase transition. The effects of disorder will be neglected for the most part but will be considered in the concluding chapters. Our focus will be on the dynamical properties of such systems at nonzero temperature, and it will become apparent that these differ substantially from the noninteracting case.