Ultracold atoms in optical lattices provide a unique opportunity to study Bose- Hubbard physics. In this work we show that by considering a spatially varying onsite interaction it is possible to manipulate the motion of excitations above the Mott phase in a Bose-Hubbard system. Specifically, we show that it is possible to engineer regimes where excitations will negatively refract, facilitating the construction of a flat lens.
We investigate the dispersion of a classical electromagnetic field in a relativistic ideal gas of charged bosons using scalar quantum electrodynamics at finite temperature and charge density. We derive the effective electromagnetic responses and the electromagnetic propagation modes that characterize the gas as a left-handed material with negative effective index of refraction $n_{rm eff}=-1$ below the transverse plasmon frequency. In the condensed phase, we show that the longitudinal plasmon dispersion relation exhibits a roton-type local minimum that disappears at the transition temperature.
We investigate the quantum measurement noise effects on the dynamics of an atomic Bose lattice gas inside an optical resonator. We describe the dynamics by means of a hybrid model consisting of a Bose--Hubbard Hamiltonian for the atoms and a Heisenberg--Langevin equation for the lossy cavity field mode. We assume that the atoms are prepared initially in the ground state of the lattice Hamiltonian and then start to interact with the cavity mode. We show that the cavity field fluctuations originating from the dissipative outcoupling of photons from the resonator lead to vastly different effects in the different possible ground state phases, i.e., the superfluid, the supersolid, the Mott- and the charge-density-wave phases. In the former two phases with the presence of a superfluid wavefunction, the quantum measurement noise appears as a driving term leading to excess noise depletion of the ground state. The time scale for the system to leave the ground scale is determined analytically. For the latter two incompressible phases, the quantum noise results in the fluctuation of the chemical potential. We derive an analytical expression for the corresponding broadening of the quasiparticle resonances.
We analyze real-time dynamics of the two-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model after a sudden quench starting from the Mott insulator by means of the two-dimensional tensor-network method. Calculated single-particle correlation functions are found to be in good agreement with a recent experiment [Y. Takasu {it et al.}, Sci. Adv. {bf 6}, eaba9255 (2020)], which cross validates the experiment and the numerical simulation. By estimating the phase and group velocities from the single-particle and density-density correlation functions, we predict how these velocities vary in the moderate interaction region, which will be useful for future experiments.
Bosonic lattice systems with non-trivial interactions represent an intriguing platform to study exotic phases of matter. Here, we study the effects of extended correlated hopping processes in a system of bosons trapped in a lattice geometry. The interplay between single particle tunneling terms, correlated hopping processes and on-site repulsion is studied by means of a combination of exact diagonalization, strong coupling expansion and cluster mean field theory. We identify a rich ground state phase diagram where, apart the usual Mott and superfluid states, superfluid phases with interesting clustering properties occur.
We theoretically consider ultracold polar molecules in a wave guide. The particles are bosons, they experience a periodic potential due to an optical lattice oriented along the wave guide and are polarised by an electric field orthogonal to the guide axis. The array is mechanically unstable by opening the transverse confinement in the direction orthogonal to the polarizing electric field and can undergo a transition to a double-chain (zigzag) structure. For this geometry we derive a multi-mode generalized Bose-Hubbard model for determining the quantum phases of the gas at the mechanical instability taking into account the quantum fluctuations in all directions of space. Our model limits the dimension of the numerically relevant Hilbert subspace by means of an appropriate decomposition of the field operator, which is obtained from a field theoretical model of the linear-zigzag instability. We determine the phase diagrams of small systems using exact diagonalization and find that, even for tight transverse confinement, the aspect ratio between the two transverse trap frequencies controls not only the classical but also the quantum properties of the ground state in a non-trivial way. Convergence tests at the linear-zigzag instability demonstrate that our multi-mode generalized Bose-Hubbard model can catch the essential features of the quantum phases of dipolar gases in confined geometries with a limited computational effort.