In this chapter, we will discuss the conditions under which ground states of quantum systems fail to develop the classical-field component and enter an insulating state. There are several reasons for this to happen. If interparticle interactions are strong and particles are heavy, bosons localize into the crystalline structure. One may argue that a solid with small zero-point fluctuations is essentially a classical state. However, in this case, we employ the classical-particle picture, which, somewhat ironically, cannot be connected to the classical-field picture without invoking quantum mechanics in a non-perturbative way. Bosons may be localized into an insulator also by a deep external lattice potential if their number is commensurate with the lattice period (in a commensurate state, the number of particles per unit lattice cell-the so-called filling factor ν-is integer). For integer ν, an insulating state that does not break any of the lattice symmetries is called a Mott insulator (MI); otherwise, the most common insulating structure is a lattice solid. Finally, an insulating state may result from placing bosons in a strong disordered potential. The generic name for such a state is the Bose glass (BG). The crucial difference between the BG and MI is that the former is compressible, while the latter has a gap for creating particle or hole excitations. Under special circumstances (e.g., in the limit of extremely large [but integer] site occupation numbers and disorder in the interaction potential or hopping amplitudes [the so-called off-diagonal disorder]), the system Hamiltonian becomes particle-hole symmetric. This symmetry leads to a new disordered insulating state, the Mott glass (MG), which has no gap for exciting particles and holes and yet has zero compressibility. Finally, superfluidity and crystalline order may coexist in one and the same material, leading to the supersolid state.
In this chapter, we will discuss the conditions under which ground states of quantum systems fail to develop the classical-field component and enter an insulating state. There are several reasons for this to happen. If interparticle interactions are strong and particles are heavy, bosons localize into the crystalline structure. One may argue that a solid with small zero-point fluctuations is essentially a classical state. However, in this case, we employ the classical-particle picture, which, somewhat ironically, cannot be connected to the classical-field picture without invoking quantum mechanics in a non-perturbative way. Bosons may be localized into an insulator also by a deep external lattice potential if their number is commensurate with the lattice period (in a commensurate state, the number of particles per unit lattice cell-the so-called filling factor ν-is integer). For integer ν, an insulating state that does not break any of the lattice symmetries is called a Mott insulator (MI); otherwise, the most common insulating structure is a lattice solid. Finally, an insulating state may result from placing bosons in a strong disordered potential. The generic name for such a state is the Bose glass (BG). The crucial difference between the BG and MI is that the former is compressible, while the latter has a gap for creating particle or hole excitations. Under special circumstances (e.g., in the limit of extremely large [but integer] site occupation numbers and disorder in the interaction potential or hopping amplitudes [the so-called off-diagonal disorder]), the system Hamiltonian becomes particle-hole symmetric. This symmetry leads to a new disordered insulating state, the Mott glass (MG), which has no gap for exciting particles and holes and yet has zero compressibility. Finally, superfluidity and crystalline order may coexist in one and the same material, leading to the supersolid state.
The phase diagrams and phase transitions of bosons with short-ranged repulsive interactions moving in periodic and/or random external potentials at zero temperature are investigated with emphasis on the superfluid-insulator transition induced by varying a parameter such as the density. Bosons in periodic potentials (e.g., on a lattice) at T=0 exhibit two types of phases: a superfluid phase and Mott insulating phases characterized by integer (or commensurate) boson densities, by the existence of a gap for particle-hole excitations, and by zero compressibility. Generically, the superfluid onset transition in d dimensions from a Mott insulator to superfluidity is ``ideal,'' or mean field in character, but at special multicritical points with particle-hole symmetry it is in the universality class of the (d+1)-dimensional XY model. In the presence of disorder, a third, ``Bose glass'' phase exists. This phase is insulating because of the localization effects of the randomness and analogous to the Fermi glass phase of interacting fermions in a strongly disordered potential.The Bose glass phase is characterized by a finite compressibility, no gap, but an infinite superfluid susceptibility. In the presence of disorder the transition to superfluidity is argued to occur only from the Bose glass phase, and never directly from the Mott insulator. This zero-temperature superfluid-insulator transition is studied via generalizations of the Josephson scaling relation for the superfluid density at the ordinary \ensuremath{\lambda} transition, highlighting the crucial role of quantum fluctuations. The transition is found to have a dynamic critical exponent z exactly equal to d and correlation length and order-parameter correlation exponents \ensuremath{\nu} and \ensuremath{\eta} which satisfy the bounds \ensuremath{\nu}\ensuremath{\ge}2/d and \ensuremath{\eta}\ensuremath{\le}2-d, respectively. It is argued that the superfluid-insulator transition in the presence of disorder may have an upper critical dimension dc which is infinite, but a perturbative renormalization-group calculation wherein the critical exponents have mean-field values for weak disorder above d=4 is also discussed. Many of these conclusions are verified by explicit calculations on a model of one-dimensional bosons in the presence of both random and periodic potentials. The general results are applied to experiments on 4He absorbed in porous media such as Vycor. Some measurable properties of the superfluid onset are predicted exactly [e.g., the exponent x relating the \ensuremath{\lambda} transition temperature to the zero-temperature superfluid density is found to be d/2(d-1)], while stringent bounds are placed on others. Analysis of preliminary data is consistent with these predictions.
Confinement of atoms by laser technology has opened up a new field of physics. Following the realization of Bose– Einstein condensation (BEC) of bosonic atoms, fermionic atom systems and even boson–fermion mixture systems were successfully trapped and cooled. Application of a periodic potential, so called optical lattice, could also unveil interesting nature of the atoms. One of the interesting phenomena of the atoms on optical lattice is Mott transition. Although there is a long history of the study on bosons or fermions on lattice, coexistence of bosons and fermions on lattice is a rather new topic to study. In particular, we have little knowledge about strongly-correlated bosons and fermions on lattice. In our previous works we performed numerical simulations of Bose–Fermi mixtures to clarify the phase diagram and the effect of the confinement potential. When the total number of bosonic and fermionic atoms per site takes an integer value and interatomic interactions are sufficiently strong, the system would undergo Mott transition where the local atom density is fixed to the integer value. A characteristic of this Mott insulating phase is that a boson and fermion located next to each other can exchange their positions by going through a virtual doubly-occupied state with the atom exchange energy t ’ tbtf=Ubf where tb and tf are the hopping energy of the bosons and fermions respectively and Ubf denotes the on-site interaction between the boson and the fermion. Although there still remain a number of open questions on the Mott state of Bose–Fermi mixtures, the property of superfluid state of the strongly-correlated bosons and fermions has yet to be revealed. In this short note we would like to focus on strongly-correlated Bose–Fermi mixtures at commensurate filling in a three-dimensional periodical potential and see characteristic behaviors, if any, of the superfluid phase close to the phase boundary to the Mott insulating phase. In the following analysis we assume uniformity of the system and thus neglect the possibility of the emergence of so-called supersolid where superfluidity and structural long-range order coexist. For simplicity we ignore all the internal degree of freedom of the atoms and the influence of the trap potential which in fact creates a nonuniform density profile of the bosons and fermions. For the system at commensurate filling on optical lattice, we assume that the interatomic interactions are weak enough to avoid formation of Mott state but strong enough to allow us to expect that there are only few empty or doublyoccupied sites and most sites are singly occupied. Namely we analyze the system that stays in a superfluid phase but lies close to the boundary to the Mott phase. Since a boson and fermion located next to each other can exchange their positions as stated above, the energy of the superfluid state of the mixture system is given mostly by the kinetic energy of the bosons and fermions exchanging their positions. We therefore express the Hamiltonian in the following form, ignoring the kinetic energy of the atoms at the empty sites and the interaction energy at the doubly-occupied sites:
Bosonic excitations within long-range ordered, but strongly inhomogeneous phases have been studied in quite some detail. My thesis focuses instead on understanding the insulating, localized phase of disordered bosonic systems. In particular I study localization properties of strongly interacting bosons and spin systems in a disorder potential at zero temperature. I focus on simple, prototypical spin models (Ising model and XY model) in random fields on a Cayley tree with large connectivity. Regarding the nature of the quantum phase transition in strong disorder I find the following results: i) With a uniformly distributed disorder non-extensive excitations in the disordered phase are all localized. ii)Moreover, I find that the order arises due to a collective condensation, which is qualitatively distinct from a Bose Einstein condensation of single particle excitations into a delocalized state. In particular, in non-frustrated Bose glasses, I do not find evidence for a boson mobility edge in the Bose glass. These results are qualitatively different from claims in the recent literatures . Considering that (many body) localization of bosons is a kind of quantum glass transition, it is an interesting question to ask what phenomena occur, if the ingredients for more conventional (classical) glassy physics are added to a disordered bosons system, namely: random, frustrated interactions between the bosons. One can still think about such a system as bosons in a disordered potential, where the disordered potential is, at least partly, self-generated by random frustrated interactions between the bosons. This question takes us to the study of another type of disordered systems: glassy systems. Those are typically characterized by low temperature phases with an inhomogeneous density or magnetization pattern, which is extremely long-lived due to the occurrence of non-trivial ergodicity breaking. I study a solvable model of hard core bosons (pseudospins) subject to disorder and frustrating interactions. This solvable model provides insight into the possibility of coexistence of super uidity and glassy density order, as well as into the nature of the coexistence phase (the superglass). In particular, for the considered mean field model I prove the existence of a superglass phase. This complements the numerical evidence for such phases provided by quantum Monte Carlo investigations in finite dimensions and on random graphs. Those were, however, limited to finite temperature, and could thus not fully elucidate the structure of the phases at T = 0. In contrast, my analytical approach allows one to understand the quantum phase transition between glassy superfluid and insulator, and the non-trivial role played by glassy correlations. When the frustrated interactions are strong enough, the superfluid order may be destroyed. As I will show in a mean field model, this happens within the glass phase of the system, where a disorder induced superfluid-insulator phase transition takes place to give way to a frustrated Bose glass. The glassy background on top of which this happens leads to many interesting phenomena which seem not to have been noticed before. To understand the nature of the glassy superfluid-insulator quantum phase transition at zero temperature and the transport properties on the insulating, Bose glass side of the transition is the goal of the third part of my thesis. To address the above questions, I studied an exactly solvable model of a glassy superfluid-insulator quantum phase transition on a Bethe lattice geometry with high connectivity. My main results can be summarized as follows: i) I found that the superfluid-insulator transition is shifted to stronger hopping. This is a result of the pseudo gap in the density of states of the glass state, which tends to strongly disfavor the onset of superfluidity. ii) In the glassy insulator, the discrete local energy levels become broadened due to the quantum fluctuations.The level-broadening process appears as a phase transition which has strong similarities with an Anderson localization transition, and has implications on many body localization. By using the locator expansion for bosons I found that, the glassy insulator has a finite mobility edge for the bosonic excitations, which, however, does not close upon approaching the SI quantum phase transition point. This finding helps to understand the nature of the superfluid-to-frustrated Bose glass transition: the superfluid emerges as a collective phase ordering phenomenon at zero temperature, and not as a condensation in to a single particle delocalized state, in contrast to opposite predictions in the recent literatures. The existence of a mobility edge in the insulator suggests the possibility of phononless, activated transport in the bosonic insulator, which might be a candidate explanation for the experimentally seen activated transport, which has remained a mystery for a long time.
In this thesis, we study three cases of insulating states of matter in terms of the renormalization procedure where the conventional renormalization group scheme is not simply applicable. The first subject is the spectral weight structure of hole-doped Mott insulators. As the mixing between two separate Hubbard bands is dynamically generated, additional charge degrees of freedom is required to give a proper description to the relevant low-energy physics. On this account, we first discuss how the low-energy Hubbard band should be partitioned to account for the extra degrees of freedom. Following the exact integration procedure of the upper Hubbard band, we explicitly demonstrate that the conserved charge cannot be exhausted by counting quasiparticles. In addition, we argue that it is the existence of dynamically generated charge degrees of freedom that gives rise to the coexistence of poles and zeroes in the single-particle Green function. In comparison to the Fermi arc structure, which is intrinsic to cuperate phenomenology, we suggest that the suppression of the spectral weight at the back side of the arc is a consequence of composite excitations, arising from dynamical mixing. The second topic we study is the nature of the transition between two insulating states of matter in a weakly disordered bosonic system. In particular, we investigate the instabilities of the Mott-insulating phase within a renormalization group analysis of the replica field theory obtained by a strong-coupling expansion around the atomic limit. To this end, we identify a new order parameter and associated correlation length scale that are capable of capturing the transition from a state with zero compressibility, the Mott insulator, to another insulating state with finite compressibility, the Bose glass. The order parameter is the relative variance of the disorder-induced mass distribution. From its distinctive behavior on each phase, we find that the divergence of the relative variance in the Bose glass signals the breakdown of self-averaging. Lastly, we also emphasize that the transition at commensurate filling is governed by a different fixed point in the renormalization group flow. The last topic discussed is the thermoelectric properties of the correlated Kondo lattice system at low temperature. Specifically, we explore the periodic Anderson impurity model with spin-orbit interactions, using the slave-particle method. As the thermopower is related to the entropy per carrier, particle-hole asymmetry and a large density of states at the chemical potential make Kondo insulator an ideal platform for thermoelectrics. In this respect, we further explore the possibility to improve the thermoelectric performance by tuning the crystal electric field splitting, the spin-orbit interaction strength, and orbital degeneracy.
We analyze the phase diagram of ultracold bosons in a one-dimensional superlattice potential with disorder, using the time-evolving block decimation algorithm for infinite-sized systems. For degenerate potential energies within the unit cell of the superlattice, loophole-shaped insulating phases with noninteger filling emerge with a particle-hole gap proportional to the boson hopping. Addition of a small amount of disorder destroys this gap. For not too large disorder, the loophole Mott regions detach from the axis of vanishing hopping, giving rise to insulating islands. Thus the system shows a transition from a compressible Bose glass to a Mott-insulating phase with increasing hopping amplitude. We present a straightforward effective model for the dynamics within a unit cell which provides a simple explanation for the emergence of Mott-insulating islands. In particular, it gives rather accurate predictions for the inner critical point of the Bose glass to Mott insulator transition.
NOTE: Text or symbols not renderable in plain ASCII are indicated by [...]. Abstract is included in .pdf document. We study the nature of various quantum phase transitions corresponding to the onset of superfluidity, at zero temperature, of bosons in a quenched medium. Particle-hole symmetry plays an essential role in determining the universality class of the transitions. To obtain a model with an exact particle-hole symmetry it is necessary to use the Josephson junction array Hamiltonian, which may include disorder in the Josephson couplings between phases at different sates. The functional integral formulation of this problem in d spatial dimensions yields a (d + 1)-dimensional classical XY-model with extended disorder, constant along the extra imaginary time dimension -- the so-called random rod problem. Particle-hole symmetry may then be broken by adding nonzero chemical potentials or site energies, which may also be site dependent and random. We may then distinguish three cases: (i) exact particle-hole symmetry, in which the site energies all vanish, (ii) statistical particle-hole symmetry in which the site energy distribution is symmetric about zero and hence vanishes on average, and (iii) complete absence of particle-hole symmetry in which the distribution is generic. We explore in each case the nature of the excitations in the nonsuperfluid Pose glass phase. We find, for example, that the compressibility, which has the interpretation of a temporal spin stiffness or superfluid density, is positive in cases (ii) and (iii), but that it vanishes with an essential singularity as full particle-hole symmetry is restored. We then focus on the critical point and discuss the validity of various scaling arguments. In particular, we argue that the dynamical exponent z could be different from d, and the arguments leading to their equality are incorrect. We then discuss the relevance of a type (ii) particle-hole symmetry breaking perturbation to the random rod critical behavior, identifying a nontrivial crossover exponent. This exponent cannot be calculated exactly but is argued to be positive and the symmetry breaking perturbation therefore relevant. We argue next that a perturbation of type (iii) is irrelevant to the resulting type (ii) critical behavior: the statistical symmetry is restored on large scales close to the critical point, and case (ii) therefore describes the dirty boson fixed point. Using various duality transformations we verify all of these ideas in one dimension. To study higher dimensions we attempt, with partial success, to generalize the Dorogovtsev-Cardy-Boyonovsky double epsilon expansion technique to this problem. We find that when the dimension of time [...] is sufficiently small the symmetry breaking perturbation of type (ii) is irrelevant, but that for sufficiently large [...] this is a relevant perturbation and a new stable commensurate fixed point appears. We speculate that this new fixed point becomes the dirty boson fixed point when [...] = 1. We also show that for [...], there exists a particle-hole asymmetric fixed point of type (iii), but we provide evidence that it merges with the commensurate fixed point for some finite [...]. This tends to confirm symmetry restoration at the physical [...] = 1.