Coexistence of superfluid and Mott phases of lattice bosons

Abstract

Recent experiments on strongly-interacting bosons in optical lattices have revealed the co-existence of spatially-separated Mott-insulating and number-fluctuating phases. The description of this inhomogeneous situation is the topic of this Letter. We establish that the number-fluctuating phase forms a superfluid trapped between the Mott-insulating regions and derive the associated collective mode structure. We discuss the interlayer's crossover between two- and three-dimensional behavior as a function of the lattice parameters and estimate the critical temperatures for the transition of the superfluid phase to a normal phase.

References in corpus (5)

• 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
• Atom trapping and two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates in field-induced adiabatic potentials

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Cold Bosons in Optical Lattices
• Intrinsic Heating and Cooling in Adiabatic Processes for Bosons in Optical Lattices
• Vortex-antivortex physics in shell-shaped Bose-Einstein condensates
• Thermodynamics in expanding shell-shaped Bose-Einstein condensates
• Superfluid and Mott Insulating shells of bosons in harmonically confined optical lattices
• ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ phases and Majorana spectroscopy in paired Bose-Hubbard chains
• Josephson physics mediated by the Mott insulating phase
• Interaction-Induced Gradients Across a Confined Fermion Lattice