Schwinger-Keldysh approach to out of equilibrium dynamics of the Bose Hubbard model with time varying hopping

TL;DR

This paper develops a real-time theoretical framework using the Schwinger-Keldysh approach to analyze the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of the Bose Hubbard model with time-dependent hopping, capturing phase transitions and metastable states.

Contribution

It introduces a strong coupling action for the Bose Hubbard model at finite temperature, enabling analysis of superfluid and Mott phases during dynamic hopping quenches.

Findings

Metastable oscillatory superfluid states after hopping quenches

System transitions between superfluid and Mott phases during dynamics

Results relate to recent cold atom experimental observations

Abstract

We study the real time dynamics of the Bose Hubbard model in the presence of time-dependent hopping allowing for a finite temperature initial state. We use the Schwinger-Keldysh technique to find the real-time strong coupling action for the problem at both zero and finite temperature. This action allows for the description of both the superfluid and Mott insulating phases. We use this action to obtain dynamical equations for the superfluid order parameter as hopping is tuned in real time so that the system crosses the superfluid phase boundary. We find that under a quench in the hopping, the system generically enters a metastable state in which the superfluid order parameter has an oscillatory time dependence with a finite magnitude, but disappears when averaged over a period. We relate our results to recent cold atom experiments.