Multi-orbital and density-induced tunneling of bosons in optical lattices

TL;DR

This paper investigates how multi-orbital effects and density-induced tunneling significantly alter the phase diagram of bosons in optical lattices, revealing new interaction mechanisms and phase transition behaviors beyond the standard models.

Contribution

It introduces an extended occupation-dependent Hubbard model incorporating multi-orbital and density-induced tunneling effects, showing deviations from traditional single-band models.

Findings

Density-induced hopping can be as significant as conventional tunneling.

Interaction effects strongly modify the superfluid to Mott-insulator transition.

The extended model predicts observable changes in experimental systems.

Abstract

We show that multi-orbital and density-induced tunneling have a significant impact on the phase diagram of bosonic atoms in optical lattices. Off-site interactions lead to density-induced hopping, the so-called bond-charge interactions, which can be identified with an effective tunneling potential and can reach the same order of magnitude as conventional tunneling. In addition, interaction-induced higher-band processes also give rise to strongly modified tunneling, on-site and bond-charge interactions. We derive an extended occupation-dependent Hubbard model with multi-orbitally renormalized processes and compute the corresponding phase diagram. It substantially deviates from the single-band Bose-Hubbard model and predicts strong changes of the superfluid to Mott-insulator transition. In general, the presented beyond-Hubbard physics plays an essential role in bosonic lattice systems and has an observable influence on experiments with tunable interactions.