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 (12)

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• Theory of Bose-Einstein condensation in trapped gases
• Cold bosonic atoms in optical lattices
• Quantum phases in an optical lattice
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• Imaging the Mott Insulator Shells using Atomic Clock Shifts
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• Formation of spatial shell structures in the superfluid to Mott insulator transition
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• Atom trapping and two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates in field-induced adiabatic potentials
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• Static and dynamic properties of shell-shaped condensates
• Thermodynamics in expanding shell-shaped Bose-Einstein condensates
• Superfluid and Mott Insulating shells of bosons in harmonically confined optical lattices
• Characteristic temperature for the immiscible-miscible transition of binary condensates in optical lattices
• Probing condensate order in deep optical lattices
• Finite-momentum superfluidity and phase transitions in a p-wave resonant Bose gas
• ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ phases and Majorana spectroscopy in paired Bose-Hubbard chains
• Josephson physics mediated by the Mott insulating phase
• Tunneling of a few strongly repulsive hard-sphere bosons in an optical lattice with tight external harmonic confinement: A quantum Monte Carlo investigation in continuous space
• Interaction-Induced Gradients Across a Confined Fermion Lattice
• Degenerate approach to the mean field Bose- Hubbard Hamiltonian