Ultracold bosons with 3-body attractive interactions in an optical lattice

We study the effect of an optical lattice (OL) on the ground-state properties of one-dimensional ultracold bosons with three-body attractive interactions and two-body repulsive interactions, which are described by a cubic-quintic Gross-Pitaevskii equation with a periodic potential. Without the optical lattice and with a vanishing two-body interaction term, normalizable soliton solutions of the Townes type are possible only at a critical value of the interaction strength, at which an infinite degeneracy of the ground state occurs; a repulsive two-body interaction makes such localized solutions unstable. We show that the OL opens a stability window around the critical point when the strength of the periodic potential is above a critical threshold. We also consider the effect of an external parabolic trap, studying how the stability properties depend on the matching between minima of the periodic potential and the minimum of the parabolic trap.     

Interacting bosons in an optical lattice

A strongly interacting Bose gas in an optical lattice is studied using a hard‐core interaction. Two different approaches are introduced, one is based on a spin‐1/2 Fermi gas with attractive interaction, the other one on a functional integral with an additional constraint (slave‐boson approach). The relation between fermions and hard‐core bosons is briefly discussed for the case of a one‐dimensional Bose gas. For a three‐dimensional gas we identify the order parameter of the Bose‐Einstein condensate through a Hubbard‐Stratonovich transformation and treat the corresponding theories within a mean‐field approximation and with Gaussian fluctuations. This allows us to evaluate the phase diagram, including the Bose‐Einstein condensate and the Mott insulator, the density‐density correlation function, the static structure factor, and the quasiparticle excitation spectrum. The role of quantum and thermal fluctuations are studied in detail for both approaches, where we find good agreement with the Gross‐Pitaevskii equation and with the Bogoliubov approach in the dilute regime. In the dense regime, which is characterized by the phase transition between the Bose‐Einstein condensate and the Mott insulator, we discuss a renormalized Gross‐Pitaevskii equation. This equation can describe the macroscopic wave function of the Bose‐Einstein condensate in the dilute regime as well as close to the transition to the Mott insulator. Finally, we compare the results of the attractive spin‐1/2 Fermi gas and those of the slave‐boson approach and find good agreement for all physical quantities.     

Staggered-vortex superfluid of ultracold bosons in an optical lattice

We show that the dynamics of cold bosonic atoms in a two-dimensional square optical lattice produced by a bichromatic light-shift potential is described by a Bose-Hubbard model with an additional effective staggered magnetic field. In addition to the known uniform superfluid and Mott insulating phases, the zero-temperature phase diagram exhibits a novel kind of finite-momentum superfluid phase, characterized by a quantized staggered rotational flux. An extension for fermionic atoms leads to an anisotropic Dirac spectrum, which is relevant to graphene and high-T(c) superconductors.     

Commensurate two-component bosons in an optical lattice: ground state phase diagram

Two sorts of bosons in an optical lattice at commensurate filling factors can form five stable super-fluid and insulating ground states with rich and nontrivial phase diagram. The structure of the ground state diagram is established by mapping a d-dimensional quantum system onto a (d+1)-dimensional classical loop-current model and Monte Carlo (MC) simulations of the latter. Surprisingly, the quantum phase diagram features, besides second-order lines, first-order transitions and two multicritical points. We explain why first-order transitions are generic for models with pairing interactions using microscopic and mean-field (MF) arguments. In some cases, the MC results strongly deviate from the MF predictions.     

Probing many-body interactions in an optical lattice clock

We present a unifying theoretical framework that describes recently observed many-body effects during the interrogation of an optical lattice clock operated with thousands of fermionic alkaline earth atoms. The framework is based on a many-body master equation that accounts for the interplay between elastic and inelastic p$p$-wave and s$s$-wave interactions, finite temperature effects and excitation inhomogeneity during the quantum dynamics of the interrogated atoms. Solutions of the master equation in different parameter regimes are presented and compared. It is shown that a general solution can be obtained by using the so called Truncated Wigner Approximation which is applied in our case in the context of an open quantum system. We use the developed framework to model the density shift and decay of the fringes observed during Ramsey spectroscopy in the JILA ⁸⁷${}^{87}$Sr and NIST ¹⁷¹${}^{171}$Yb optical lattice clocks. The developed framework opens a suitable path for dealing with a variety of strongly-correlated and driven open-quantum spin systems.     

Possibility of a first-order superfluid-Mott-insulator transition of spinor bosons in an optical lattice

We study the superfluid-Mott-insulator transition of antiferromagnetic spin-1 bosons in an optical lattice described by a Bose-Hubbard model. Our variational study with the Gutzwiller variational wave function determines that the superfluid-Mott-insulator transition is a first-order one at a part of the phase boundary curve, contrary to the spinless case.     

Incommensurate superfluidity of bosons in a double-well optical lattice

We study bosons in the first excited Bloch band of a double-well optical lattice, recently realized at NIST. By calculating the relevant parameters from a realistic nonseparable lattice potential, we find that in the most favorable cases, the boson lifetime in the first excited band can be several orders of magnitude longer than the typical nearest-neighbor tunneling time scales, in contrast with that of a simple single-well lattice. In addition, for sufficiently small lattice depths, the excited band has minima at nonzero momenta incommensurate with the lattice period, which opens a possibility to realize an exotic superfluid state that spontaneously breaks the time-reversal, rotational, and translational symmetries. We discuss possible experimental signatures of this novel state.     

Gutzwiller study of spin-1 bosons in an optical lattice under a magnetic field

We study spin-1 bosons in an optical lattice under a magnetic field with the Gutzwiller approximation for the Bose-Hubbard model. Phase boundary curves between superfluids and Mott insulators depend continuously on the magnetic field, and this provides better results than those obtained with the perturbative mean-field approximation. The phase boundary curve as a function of magnetic field has a sharp cusp structure under certain circumstances. In superfluid phases, both the spin magnetizations and fluctuations in the total number of bosons show strong magnetic field dependence, which is related to the fact that both first-and second-order transitions appear on the phase boundary curve according to the magnetic field.     

Optimized energy calculation in lattice systems with long-range interactions

We discuss an efficient approach to the calculation of the internal energy in numerical simulations of spin systems with long-range interactions. Although, since the introduction of the Luijten-Blote algorithm, Monte Carlo simulations of these systems no longer pose a fundamental problem, the energy calculation is still an O(N2) problem for systems of size N. We show how this can be reduced to an O(N log N) problem, with a break-even point that is already reached for very small systems. This allows the study of a variety of, until now hardly accessible, physical aspects of these systems. In particular, we combine the optimized energy calculation with histogram interpolation methods to investigate the specific heat of the Ising model and the first-order regime of the three-state Potts model with long-range interactions.     

Time-reversal symmetry breaking of p-orbital bosons in a one-dimensional optical lattice

We study bosons loaded in a one-dimensional optical lattice of twofold p-orbital degeneracy at each site. Our numerical simulations find an anti-ferro-orbital p(x)+ip(y), a homogeneous p(x) Mott-insulator phase, and two kinds of superfluid phases distinguished by the orbital order (anti-ferro-orbital and paraorbital). The anti-ferro-orbital order breaks time-reversal symmetry. Experimentally observable evidence is predicted for the phase transition between the two different superfluid phases. We also discover that the quantum noise measurement is able to provide a concrete evidence of time-reversal symmetry breaking in the first Mott phase.     

Mott-Hubbard transition of bosons in optical lattices with two-body interactions

In this paper, based on the Bose-Hubbard model with two-body on-site interactions, we study the quantum phase transition between the superfluid state and the Mott-insulator state. With the decoupling approximation, we get the relation between the weak superfluidity and dimensionless chemical potential with different particle number and different dimensionless interaction strength, and the relation between the weak superfluidity and the reciprocal of dimensionless interaction strength with different particle number. We also calculate the corresponding experimental parameters.     

Reentrant phenomenon in the quantum phase transitions of a gas of bosons trapped in an optical lattice

We calculate the location of the quantum phase transitions of a Bose gas trapped in an optical lattice as a function of effective scattering length a(eff) and temperature T. Knowledge of recent high-loop results on the shift of the critical temperature at weak couplings is used to locate a nose in the phase diagram above the free Bose-Einstein critical temperature T((0))(c), thus predicting the existence of a reentrant transition above T((0))(c), where a condensate should form when increasing a(eff). At zero temperature, the transition to the normal phase produces the experimentally observed Mott insulator.     

Mott-Hubbard transition of bosons in optical lattices with two-body interactions

In this paper, based on the Bose-Hubbard model with two-body on-site interactions, we study the quantum phase transition between the superfluid state and the Mott-insulator state. With the decoupling approximation, we get the relation between the weak superfluidity and dimensionless chemical potential with different particle number and different dimensionless interaction strength, and the relation between the weak superfluidity and the reciprocal of dimensionless interaction strength with different particle number. We also calculate the corresponding experimental parameters.     

Probing states in the Mott insulator regime in the case of coherent bosons trapped in an optical lattice

We propose a method to probe states in the Mott insulator regime produced from a condensate in an optical lattice. We consider a system in which we create time-dependent number fluctuations in a given site by turning off the atomic interactions and lowering the potential barriers on a nearly pure Mott state to allow the atoms to tunnel between sites. We calculate the expected interference pattern and number fluctuations from such a system and show that one can potentially observe a deviation from a pure Mott state. We also discuss a method in which to detect these number fluctuations using time-of-flight imaging.     

Resonant long-range interactions between polar macromolecules

Motivated by its prospective biological relevance, the issue of resonant long-range interactions between two molecules displaying oscillating dipole moments is reinvestigated within the framework of classical electrodynamics. In particular, our findings shed new light on Fröhlich?s theory of selective long-range interactions between biomolecules. First, terms of a very long-range kind – which have never been reported so far – are found in the interaction potential, due to field retardation. Second, at variance with a long-standing belief, it is shown that sizable resonant long-range interactions may exist only if the interacting system is out of thermal equilibrium.     

Two-step condensation of lattice bosons

We present a theoretical study of Bose-Einstein condensation in highly anisotropic harmonic traps. The bosons are considered to be moving in an optical lattice in an overall anisotropic harmonic confining potential. We find that two-step condensation occurs for lattice bosons at much reduced harmonic potential anisotropy when compared to the case of an ideal Bose gas in an anisotropic harmonic confinement. We also show that when the bosons are in an isotropic harmonic confinement but with highly anisotropic hopping in the optical lattice, two-step condensation does not occur. We interpret some of our results using single boson density of energy states corresponding to the potentials faced by the bosons.     

Metastable states of a gas of dipolar bosons in a 2D optical lattice

We investigate the physics of dipolar bosons in a two-dimensional optical lattice. It is known that due to the long-range character of dipole-dipole interaction, the ground state phase diagram of a gas of dipolar bosons in an optical lattice presents novel quantum phases, like checkerboard and supersolid phases. In this Letter, we consider the properties of the system beyond its ground state, finding that it is characterized by a multitude of almost degenerate metastable states, often competing with the ground state. This makes dipolar bosons in a lattice similar to a disordered system and opens possibilities of using them as quantum memories.     

Yangian symmetry and Virasoro character in a lattice spin system with long-range interactions

We consider the symmetry of lattice su(n) spin systems with inverse square exchange; the Haldane-Shastry model and the Polychronakos-Frahm model. It is shown that both systems have yangian symmetry for a finite number of sites. Based on the yangian symmetry the energy spectrum is considered. Furthermore the representation for motifs and the relations with the Virasoro character for su(n) level-1 Wess-Zumino- Witten theory are discussed.     

Ferroelectric square lattice described by the transverse Ising model with long-range interactions

A ferroelectric square lattice described by the transverse Ising model is studied by taking into account the long-range interactions. The size dependence of the Curie temperature as well as the polarization of the lattice is studied. Dielectric peaks and pyroelectric peaks are found in the edge area of the lattice which vary in position with the interaction range. It is found that the interaction range has a strong influence on the ferroelectric properties of the lattice.