We numerically study the superfluid to Mott insulator transition for bosonic atoms in a one-dimensional lattice by exploiting a recently developed simulation method for strongly correlated systems. We demonstrate this method's accuracy and applicability to Bose-Hubbard model calculations by comparison with exact results for small systems. By utilizing the efficient scaling of this algorithm we then concentrate on systems of comparable size to those studied in experiments and in the presence of a magnetic trap. We investigate spatial correlations and fluctuations of the ground state as well as the nature and speed at which the superfluid component is built up when dynamically melting a Mott insulating state by ramping down the lattice potential. This is performed for slow ramping, where we find that the superfluid builds up on a time scale consistent with single-atom hopping and for rapid ramping where the buildup is much faster than can be explained by this simple mechanism. Our calculations are in remarkable agreement with the experimental results obtained by Greiner et al. [Nature (London) 415, 39 (2002)].
We numerically study the superfluid to Mott insulator transition for bosonic atoms in a one-dimensional lattice by exploiting a recently developed simulation method for strongly correlated systems. We demonstrate this method's accuracy and applicability to Bose-Hubbard model calculations by comparison with exact results for small systems. By utilizing the efficient scaling of this algorithm we then concentrate on systems of comparable size to those studied in experiments and in the presence of a magnetic trap. We investigate spatial correlations and fluctuations of the ground state as well as the nature and speed at which the superfluid component is built up when dynamically melting a Mott insulating state by ramping down the lattice potential. This is performed for slow ramping, where we find that the superfluid builds up on a time scale consistent with single-atom hopping and for rapid ramping where the buildup is much faster than can be explained by this simple mechanism. Our calculations are in remarkable agreement with the experimental results obtained by Greiner et al. [Nature (London) 415, 39 (2002)].
We study the dynamics of phase transitions in the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model. To drive the system from a Mott insulator to a superfluid phase, we change the tunneling frequency at a finite rate. We investigate the buildup of correlations during fast and slow transitions using variational wave functions, dynamical Bogoliubov theory, Kibble-Zurek mechanism, and numerical simulations. We show that time-dependent correlations satisfy characteristic scaling relations that can be measured in optical lattices filled with cold atoms.
A large-scale dynamical simulation of the superfluid--Mott-insulator transition in a gas of ultracold atoms placed in an optical lattice is performed using the time-dependent Gutzwiller mean-field approach. This approximate treatment allows us to take into account most of the details of the recent experiment [Greiner et al., Nature (London) 415, 39 (2002)] where by changing the depth of the lattice potential an adiabatic transition from a superfluid to a Mott insulator state has been reported. Our simulations reveal a significant excitation of the system with a transition to insulator in restricted regions of the trap only.
We investigate the expansion of bosons and fermions in a homogeneous lattice after a sudden removal of the trapping potential using exact numerical methods. As a main result, we show that in one dimension, both bosonic and fermionic Mott insulators expand with the same velocity, irrespective of the interaction strength, provided the expansion starts from the ground state of the trapped gas. Furthermore, their density profiles become identical during the expansion; the asymptotic density dynamics is identical to that of initially localized, noninteracting particles, and the asymptotic velocity distribution is flat. The expansion velocity for initial correlated Mott insulating states is therefore independent of the interaction strength and particle statistics. Interestingly, this nonequilibrium dynamics is sensitive to the interaction driven quantum phase transition in the Bose-Hubbard model; while being constant in the Mott phase, the expansion velocity decreases in the superfluid phase and vanishes for large systems in the noninteracting limit. These results are compared to the setup of a recent experiment [Ronzheimer et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 205301 (2013)], where the trap opening was combined with an interaction quench from infinitely strong interactions to finite values. In the latter case, the interaction quench breaks the universal dynamics in the asymptotic regime and the expansion depends on the interaction strength. We carry out an analogous analysis for a two-component Fermi gas, with similar observations. In addition, we study the effect of breaking the integrability of hard-core bosons in different ways; while the fast ballistic expansion from the ground state of Mott insulators in one dimension remains unchanged for finite interactions, we observe strong deviations from this behavior on a two-leg ladder even in the hard-core case. This change in dynamics bares similarities with the dynamics in the dimensional crossover from one to two dimensions observed in the aformentioned experimental study.
The Bose-Hubbard model describes the physics of a system of bosonic ultracold atoms in an optical lattice, in which a phase transition is present between a superfluid phase and a Mott insulator one. \nThe exact solution of this Hamiltonian is only feasible to find the ground-state of small systems, while other techniques (as mean-field schemes or quantum Monte Carlo) are necessary to study systems of larger size. \n \nAs a first application, we study the trapped model - relevant for the comparison with current experiments - through an inhomogeneous mean-field scheme. We describe some signatures of the phase crossover between superfluid and Mott insulator. In particular, the visibility of the quasimomentum distribution shows some kinks as a function of the lattice depth; we describe these features and we link them with the ones observed in other works in the literature. \n \nAs a second application, we use quantum Monte Carlo techniques to study the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model with long-range interactions and we focus on the appearance of the Haldane insulating phase, distinguishable from the Mott one through the presence of non-local hidden order. \nNon-local correlation functions are also used to describe the difference between the superfluid phase and the Mott insulator one.
We investigate the equilibrium and dynamical properties of the Bose-Hubbard model and the related particle-hole symmetric spin-1 model in the vicinity of the superfluid to Mott insulator quantum phase transition. We employ the following methods: exact-diagonalization, mean-field (Gutzwiller), cluster mean-field, and mean-field plus Gaussian fluctuations. In the first part of the paper we benchmark the four methods by analyzing the equilibrium problem and give numerical estimates for observables such as the density of double occupancies and their correlation function. In the second part, we study parametric ramps from the superfluid to the Mott insulator and map out the crossover from the regime of fast ramps, which is dominated by local physics, to the regime of slow ramps with a characteristic universal power law scaling, which is dominated by long wavelength excitations. We calculate values of several relevant physical observables, characteristic time scales, and an optimal protocol needed for observing universal scaling.
We use the density-matrix renormalization group method to investigate ground-state and dynamic properties of the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model, the effective model of ultracold bosonic atoms in an optical lattice. For fixed maximum site occupancy n b = 5, we calculate the phase boundaries between the Mott insulator and the "superfluid" phase for the lowest two Mott lobes. We extract the Tomonaga-Luttinger parameter from the density-density correlation function and determine accurately the critical interaction strength for the Mott transition. For both phases, we study the momentum distribution function in the homogeneous system, and the particle distribution and quasi-momentum distribution functions in a parabolic trap. With our zero-temperature method we determine the photoemission spectra in the Mott insulator and in the "superfluid" phase of the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model. In the insulator, the Mott gap separates the quasi-particle and quasi-hole dispersions. In the "superfluid" phase the spectral weight is concentrated around zero momentum.