No Arabic abstract
Recent advances in cooling techniques make now possible the experimental study of quantum phase transitions, which are transitions near absolute zero temperature accessed by varying a control parameter. A paradigmatic example is the superfluid-Mott transition of interacting bosons on a periodic lattice. From the relativistic Ginzburg-Landau action of this superfluid-Mott transition we derive the elementary excitations of the bosonic system, which contain in the superfluid phase a gapped Higgs mode and a gappless Goldstone mode. We show that this energy spectrum is in good agreement with the available experimental data and we use it to extract, with the help of dimensional regularization, meaningful analytical formulas for the beyond-mean-field equation of state in two and three spatial dimensions. We find that, while the mean-field equation of state always gives a second-order quantum phase transition, the inclusion of Gaussian quantum fluctuations can induce a first-order quantum phase transition. This prediction is a strong benchmark for next future experiments on quantum phase transitions.
We study the thermodynamics near the generic (density-driven) superfluid--Mott-insulator transition in the three-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model using the nonperturbative renormalization-group approach. At low energy the physics is controlled by the Gaussian fixed point and becomes universal. Thermodynamic quantities can then be expressed in terms of the universal scaling functions of the dilute Bose gas universality class while the microscopic physics enters only {it via} two nonuniversal parameters, namely the effective mass $m^*$ and the scattering length $a^*$ of the elementary excitations at the quantum critical point between the superfluid and Mott-insulating phase. A notable exception is the condensate density in the superfluid phase which is proportional to the quasi-particle weight $Zqp$ of the elementary excitations. The universal regime is defined by $m^*a^*{}^2 Tll 1$ and $m^*a^*{}^2|deltamu|ll 1$, or equivalently $|bar n-bar n_c|a^*{}^3ll 1$, where $deltamu=mu-mu_c$ is the chemical potential shift from the quantum critical point $(mu=mu_c,T=0)$ and $bar n-bar n_c$ the doping with respect to the commensurate density $bar n_c$ of the T=0 Mott insulator. We compute $Zqp$, $m^*$ and $a^*$ and find that they vary strongly with both the ratio $t/U$ between hopping amplitude and on-site repulsion and the value of the (commensurate) density $bar n_c$. Finally, we discuss the experimental observation of universality and the measurement of $Zqp$, $m^*$ and $a^*$ in a cold atomic gas in an optical lattice.
We study near-equilibrium thermodynamics of bosonic atoms in a two-dimensional optical lattice by ramping up the lattice depth to convert a superfluid into an inhomogeneous mixture of superfluid and Mott insulator. Detailed study of in situ density profiles shows that, first, locally adiabatic ramps do not guarantee global thermal equilibrium. Indeed, full thermalization for typical parameters only occurs for experiment times which exceed one second. Secondly, ramping non-adiabatically to the Mott insulator regime can result in strong localized cooling at short times and global cooling once equilibrated. For an initial temperature estimated as 20 nK, we observe local temperatures as low as 1.5 nK, and a final global temperature of 9 nK. Possible cooling mechanisms include adiabatic decompression, modification of the density of states near the quantum critical regime, and the Joule-Thomson effect. **NOTE: Following submission of arXiv:0910.1382v1, a systematic correction was discovered in the density measurement, stemming from three-body losses during the imaging process. New measurements were performed, and the result is in support of the claim on the slow global dynamics. Due to the substantially altered methods and analysis, a new text has been posted as arXiv:1003.0855.
The coexistence of superfluid and Mott insulator, due to the quadratic confinement potential in current optical lattice experiments, makes the accurate detection of the superfluid-Mott transition difficult. Studying alternative trapping potentials which are experimentally realizable and have a flatter center, we find that the transition can be better resolved, but at the cost of a more difficult tuning of the particle filling. When mapping out the phase diagram using local probes and the local density approximation we find that the smoother gradient of the parabolic trap is advantageous.
We report on a novel structural Superfluid-Mott Insulator (SF-MI) quantum phase transition for an interacting one-dimensional Bose gas within permeable multi-rod lattices, where the rod lengths are varied from zero to the lattice period length. We use the ab-initio diffusion Monte Carlo method to calculate the static structure factor, the insulation gap, and the Luttinger parameter, which we use to determine if the gas is a superfluid or a Mott insulator. For the Bose gas within a square Kronig-Penney (KP) potential, where barrier and well widths are equal, the SF-MI coexistence curve shows the same qualitative and quantitative behavior as that of a typical optical lattice with equal periodicity but slightly larger height. When we vary the width of the barriers from zero to the length of the potential period, keeping the height of the KP barriers, we observe a new way to induce the SF-MI phase transition. Our results are of significant interest, given the recent progress on the realization of optical lattices with a subwavelength structure that would facilitate their experimental observation.
We present a universal theory for the critical behavior of an impurity at the two-dimensional superfluid-Mott insulator transition. Our analysis is motivated by a numerical study of the Bose-Hubbard model with an impurity site by Huang et al. (Phys. Rev. B 94, 220502 (2016)), who found an impurity phase transition as a function of the trapping potential. The bulk theory is described by the $O(2)$ symmetric Wilson-Fisher conformal field theory, and we model the impurity by a localized spin-1/2 degree of freedom. We also consider a generalized model by considering an $O(N)$ symmetric bulk theory coupled to a spin-$S$ degree of freedom. We study this field theory using the $epsilon = 3 - d$ expansion, where the impurity-bulk interaction flows to an infrared stable fixed point at the critical trapping potential. We determine the scaling dimensions of the impurity degree of freedom and the associated critical exponents near the critical point. We also determine the universal contribution of the impurity to the finite temperature compressibility of the system at criticality. Our results are compared with recent numerical simulations.