Correlated bosons in a one-dimensional optical lattice: Effects of the trapping potential and of quasiperiodic disorder

Abstract

We investigate the effect of the trapping potential on the quantum phases of strongly correlated ultracold bosons in one-dimensional periodic and quasiperiodic optical lattices. By means of a decoupling meanfield approach, we characterize the ground state of the system and its behavior under variation of the harmonic trapping, as a function of the total number of atoms. For a small atom number the system shows an incompressible Mott-insulating phase, as the size of the cloud remains unaffected when the trapping potential is varied. When the quasiperiodic potential is added the system develops a metastable-disordered phase which is neither compressible nor Mott insulating. This state is characteristic of quasidisorder in the presence of a strong trapping potential.

Accepted for publication in PRA

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Ultracold bosons with short-range interaction in regular optical lattices
• Correlation function of weakly interacting bosons in a disordered lattice
• Strongly interacting bosons in multi-chromatic potentials supporting mobility edges: localization, quasi-condensation and expansion dynamics
• Excitations in disordered bosonic optical lattices