Thermal transitions of the modulated superfluid for spin-orbit coupled correlated bosons in an optical lattice

Abstract

We investigate the thermal physics of a Bose-Hubbard model with Rashba spin-orbit coupling starting from a strong coupling mean-field ground state. The essential role of the spin-orbit coupling $\left(\gamma \right)$ is to promote condensation of the bosons at a finite wavevector $k_0$. We find that the bosons display either homogeneous or phase-twisted or orbital ordered superfluid phases, depending on $\gamma$ and the inter-species interaction strength $\lambda$. We show that an increase of $\gamma$ leads to suppression of the critical interaction $U_c$ for the superfluid to Mott insulator transition in the ground state, and a reduction of the $T_c$ for superfluid to Bose-liquid transition at a fixed interaction. We capture the thermal broadening in the momentum distribution function, and the real space profiles of the thermally disordered magnetic textures, including their homogenization for $T\gtrsim T_c$. We provide a Landau theory based description of the ground state phase boundaries and thermal transition scales, and discuss experiments which can test our theory.

11 pages, 12 figures

References in corpus (17)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Probing many-body dynamics on a 51-atom quantum simulator
• Quantum Simulation of Antiferromagnetic Spin Chains in an Optical Lattice
• Observation of the supersolid stripe phase in spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates
• A Bose-Einstein Condensate in a Uniform Light-induced Vector Potential
• Observation of antiferromagnetic correlations in the Hubbard model with ultracold atoms
• Spin Hall effects for cold atoms in a light induced gauge potential
• Bose Hubbard Models with Synthetic Spin-Orbit Coupling: Mott Insulators, Spin Textures and Superfluidity
• Non-Abelian optical lattices: Anomalous quantum Hall effect and Dirac Fermions
• Mott insulator to superfluid transition in the Bose-Hubbard model: a strong-coupling approach
• Strong-coupling expansion for the momentum distribution of the Bose Hubbard model with benchmarking against exact numerical results
• Phase Boundary of the Boson Mott Insulator in a Rotating Optical Lattice
• Metal-Insulator Transition Revisited for Cold Atoms in Non-Abelian Gauge Potentials
• Interacting Hofstadter spectrum of atoms in an artificial gauge field
• Thermal Phase Transitions of Strongly Correlated Bosons with Spin-Orbit Coupling
• Frustration effects in rapidly rotating square and triangular optical lattices
• Rotating states for trapped bosons in an optical lattice