Pure Mott phases in confined ultracold atomic systems

Abstract

We propose a novel scheme for confining atoms to optical lattices by engineering a spatially-inhomogeneous hopping matrix element in the Hubbard-model (HM) description, a situation we term off-diagonal confinement (ODC). We show, via an exact numerical solution of the boson HM with ODC, that this scheme possesses distinct advantages over the conventional method of confining atoms using an additional trapping potential, including the presence of incompressible Mott phases at commensurate filling and a phase diagram that is similar to the uniform HM. The experimental implementation of ODC will thus allow a more faithful realization of correlated phases of interest in cold atom experiments.

4 Pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Quantum phase transition from a superfluid to a Mott insulator in a gas of ultracold atoms
• Imaging the Mott Insulator Shells using Atomic Clock Shifts
• Quantum Monte Carlo simulations of confined bosonic atoms in optical lattices
• Formation of spatial shell structures in the superfluid to Mott insulator transition
• The Stochastic Green Function (SGF) algorithm
• Directed update for the Stochastic Green Function algorithm
• Canonical Trajectories and Critical Coupling of the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian in a Harmonic Trap

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Synthetic Unruh effect in cold atoms
• Simulating quantum-optical phenomena with cold atoms in optical lattices
• Equilibrium and off-equilibrium trap-size scaling in 1D ultracold bosonic gases
• Pure Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov state in optical lattices
• Quasi-long-range order in trapped systems
• Superconductivity and charge order of confined Fermi systems
• Extracting the Mott gap from energy measurements in trapped atomic gases
• Using off-diagonal confinement as a cooling method
• Optimized Confinement of Fermions in Two Dimensions