Beyond the Hubbard bands in strongly correlated lattice bosons

TL;DR

This paper explores additional spectral features in the Bose-Hubbard model's strongly correlated phase, revealing thermally activated sidebands and fluctuation resonances, with implications for experimental spectroscopy and thermometry.

Contribution

It identifies and characterizes new spectral features beyond Hubbard bands in strongly correlated lattice bosons, including thermally activated sidebands and fluctuation resonances, supported by nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory.

Findings

Identification of thermally activated Hubbard sidebands.

Discovery of two-particle fluctuation resonances.

Prediction of temperature-dependent spectral features.

Abstract

We investigate features in the single-particle spectral function beyond the Hubbard bands in the strongly correlated normal phase of the Bose-Hubbard model. There are two distinct classes of additional peaks generated by the bosonic statistics. The first type is thermally activated Hubbard "sidebands", with the same physical origin as the zero-temperature Hubbard bands, but generated by excitations from thermally activated local occupation number states. The second class are two-particle fluctuation resonances driven by the lattice dynamics. In the unity filling Mott insulator, this takes the form of a localized triplon combined with a dispersing holon. Both types of resonances also manifest themselves in the structure factor and the interaction modulation spectra obtained from nonequilibrium bosonic dynamical mean-field theory calculations. Our findings explain experimental lattice modulation and Bragg spectroscopy results, and they predict a strong temperature dependence of the first sideband, thereby opening the door to precise thermometry of strongly correlated lattice bosons.