Mott Insulators

Emil Lundh

The hydrodynamics of a lattice Bose gas in a time-dependent external potential is studied in a mean-field approximation. The conditions under which a Mott insulating region can melt, and the local density can adjust to the new potential, are determined. In the case of a suddenly switched potential, it is found that the Mott insulator stays insulating and the density will not adjust if the switch is too abrupt. This comes about because too rapid currents result in Bloch oscillation-type current reversals. For a stirrer moved through a Mott insulating cloud, it is seen that only if the stirrer starts in a superfluid region and the velocity is comparable to the time scale set by the tunneling will the Mott insulator be affected.

Sindhunil Barman Roy

Hong Yao, Steven Allan Kivelson

We prove that there exists a class of crystalline insulators, which we call "fragile Mott insulators," which are not adiabatically connected to any sort of band insulator provided time-reversal and certain point-group symmetries are respected, but which are otherwise unspectacular in that they exhibit no topological order nor any form of fractionalized quasiparticles. Different fragile Mott insulators are characterized by different nontrivial one-dimensional representations of the crystal point group. We illustrate this new type of insulators with two examples: the d Mott insulator discovered in the checkerboard Hubbard model at half-filling and the Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki insulator on the square lattice.

Steven Allan Kivelson, Hong Yao

B. H. Brandow

Michiel Snoek

We provide a rigorous derivation of Gutzwiller mean-field dynamics for lattice bosons, showing that it is exact on fully connected lattices. We apply this formalism to quenches in the interaction parameter from the Mott insulator to the superfluid state. Although within mean-field the Mott insulator is a steady state, we show that a dynamical critical interaction U d exists, such that for final interaction parameter U f > U d the Mott insulator is exponentially unstable towards emerging long-range superfluid order, whereas for U f < U d the Mott insulating state is stable. We discuss the implications of this prediction for finite-dimensional systems.