Mott transition for strongly-interacting one-dimensional bosons in a shallow periodic potential

Laurent Sanchez-Palencia

Guilhem Boéris, Lorenzo Gori, Maarten D. Hoogerland +9 more

We investigate the superfluid-insulator transition of one-dimensional interacting bosons in both deep and shallow periodic potentials. We compare a theoretical analysis based on quantum Monte Carlo simulations in continuum space and Luttinger liquid approach with experiments on ultracold atoms with tunable interactions and optical lattice depth. Experiments and theory are in excellent agreement. Our study provides a quantitative determination of the critical parameters for the Mott transition and defines the regimes of validity of widely used approximate models, namely, the Bose-Hubbard and sine-Gordon models.

Oleg L. Berman, Roman Ya. Kezerashvili, Yu. E. Lozovik +1 more

Subhrajyoti Roy, Rhombik Roy, Andrea Trombettoni +2 more

We investigate the dynamics of one-dimensional interacting bosons in an optical lattice after a sudden quench in the weakly interacting (Bose-Hubbard) and strongly interacting (sine-Gordon) regimes. While in a higher dimension, the Mott-superfluid phase transition is observed for weakly interacting bosons in deep lattices, in one dimension an instability is generated also for shallow lattices with a commensurate periodic potential pinning the atoms to the Mott state through a transition described by the sine-Gordon model. The present work aims at identifying the quench dynamics in both the Bose-Hubbard and sine-Gordon interaction regimes. We numerically exactly solve the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation for a small number of atoms and obtain dynamical measures of several key quantities. We investigate the correlation dynamics of first and second order; both exhibit rich many-body features in the dynamics. We conclude that in both cases, dynamics exhibits collapse-revival phenomena, though with different timescales. We argue that the dynamical fragmentation is a convenient quantity to distinguish the dynamics especially near the pinning zone. To understand the relaxation process we measure the many-body information entropy. Bose-Hubbard dynamics clearly establishes the possible relaxation to the maximum entropy state. In contrast, the sine-Gordon dynamics is so fast that it does not exhibit any signature of relaxation in the present timescale of computation.

Satoshi Fujimoto

Masanori Kohno