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

TL;DR

This study uses quantum Monte Carlo methods to analyze how strong repulsive interactions affect tunneling and occupancy in hard-sphere bosons confined in an optical lattice with harmonic trapping, revealing minimal wavefunction overlap changes and occupancy shifts.

Contribution

It provides a detailed continuous-space quantum Monte Carlo investigation of strongly interacting bosons in optical lattices, highlighting effects of repulsion and lattice spacing on tunneling and site occupancy.

Findings

Tunneling amplitude increases as lattice spacing decreases.

Wavefunction overlap remains nearly unchanged with increased repulsion for small boson numbers.

Occupancy shifts from trap center to edges with stronger repulsion.

Abstract

The effect of strongly repulsive interactions on the tunneling amplitude of hard-sphere (HS) bosons confined in a simple cubic (sc) optical lattice plus tight external harmonic confinement in continuous space is investigated. The quantum variational Monte Carlo (VMC) and the variational path integral Monte Carlo (VPI) techniques are used at zero temperature. The effects of the lattice spacing $\pi/k$ on the tunneling amplitude is also considered. The occupancies of the lattice sites as a function of the repulsion between the bosons are further revealed. Our chief result is, that for a small number of bosons (N=8) the overlap of the wave functions in neighboring wells does not change with an increase of the repulsive interactions and changes only minimally for a larger number of particles (N=40). The tunneling amplitude rises with a reduction in the lattice spacing. In addition, the occupancy of the center of the trap decreases in favor of a rise in the occupancy of the lattice sites at the edges of the trap with increasing HS repulsion. Further, it was found that the energy per particle at certain optical depths is insensitive to the number of particles and variations in the HS diameter of the bosons. In order to support our results, we compare the VMC results with corresponding VPI results.