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We consider a boundary between a Mott insulator and a superfluid region of a Bose-Hubbard model at unit filling. Initially both regions are decoupled and cooled to their respective ground states. We show that, after switching on a small tunneling rate between both regions, all particles of the Mott region migrate to the superfluid area. This migration takes place whenever the difference between the chemical potentials of both regions is less than the maximal energy of any eigenmode of the superfluid. We verify our results numerically with DMRG simulations and explain them analytically with a master equation approximation, finding good agreement between both approaches. Finally we carry out a feasibility study for the observation of the effect in coupled arrays of micro-cavities and optical lattices.
We investigate topological transport in a spin-orbit coupled bosonic Mott insulator. We show that interactions can lead to anomalous quasi-particle dynamics even when the spin-orbit coupling is abelian. To illustrate the latter, we consider the spin-orbit coupling realized in the experiment of Lin textit{et al}. [Nature (London) textbf{471}, 83 (2011)]. For this spin-orbit coupling, we compute the quasiparticle dispersions and spectral weights, the interaction-induced momentum space Berry curvature, and the momentum space distribution of spin density, and propose experimental signatures. Furthermore, we find that in our approximation for the single-particle propagator, the ground state can in principle support an integer Hall conductivity if the sum of the Chern numbers of the hole bands is nonzero.
We study the superfluid-insulator transition in Bose-Hubbard models in one-, two-, and three-dimensional cubic lattices by means of a recently proposed variational wave function. In one dimension, the variational results agree with the expected Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless scenario of the interaction-driven Mott transition. In two and three dimensions, we find evidences that, across the transition,most of the spectral weight is concentrated at high energies, suggestive of pre-formed Mott-Hubbard side-bands. This result is compatible with the experimental data by Stoferle et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 130403 (2004)].
We study the effects of hole doping on one-dimensional Mott insulators with orbital degrees of freedom. We describe the system in terms of a generalized t-J model. At a specific point in parameter space the model becomes integrable in analogy to the one-band supersymmetric t-J model. We use the Bethe ansatz to derive a set of nonlinear integral equations which allow us to study the thermodynamics exactly. Moving away from this special point in parameter space we use the density-matrix renormalization group applied to transfer matrices to study the evolution of various phases of the undoped system with doping and temperature. Finally, we study a one-dimensional version of a realistic model for cubic titanates which includes the anisotropy of the orbital sector due to Hunds coupling. We find a transition from a phase with antiferromagnetically correlated spins to a phase where the spins are fully ferromagnetically polarized, a strong tendency towards phase separation at large Hunds coupling, as well as the possibility of an instability towards triplet superconductivity.
We demonstrate many-body multifractality of the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonians ground state in Fock space, for arbitrary values of the interparticle interaction. Generalized fractal dimensions unambiguously signal, even for small system sizes, the emergence of a Mott insulator, that cannot, however, be naively identified with a localized phase in Fock space. We show that the scaling of the derivative of any generalized fractal dimension with respect to the interaction strength encodes the critical point of the superfluid to Mott insulator transition, and provides an efficient way to accurately estimate its position. We further establish that the transition can be quantitatively characterized by one single wavefunction amplitude from the exponentially large Fock space.
The phase diagram of the simplest approximation to Double-Exchange systems, the bosonic Double-Exchange model with antiferromagnetic super-exchange coupling, is fully worked out by means of Monte Carlo simulations, large-N expansions and Variational Mean-Field calculations. We find a rich phase diagram, with no first-order phase transitions. The most surprising finding is the existence of a segment like ordered phase at low temperature for intermediate AFM coupling which cannot be detected in neutron-scattering experiments. This is signaled by a maximum (a cusp) in the specific heat. Below the phase-transition, only short-range ordering would be found in neutron-scattering. Researchers looking for a Quantum Critical Point in manganites should be wary of this possibility. Finite-Size Scaling estimates of critical exponents are presented, although large scaling corrections are present in the reachable lattice sizes.