Density-dependent hopping for ultracold atoms immersed in a Bose-Einstein-condensate vortex lattice

TL;DR

This paper explores how a vortex lattice in a Bose-Einstein condensate affects immersed ultracold bosonic impurities, revealing a density-dependent hopping mechanism and a long-range attraction that influence the quantum phase diagram.

Contribution

It introduces a model incorporating density-dependent hopping and long-range attraction for impurities in a vortex lattice, extending the Bose-Hubbard framework.

Findings

Identification of a long-range attractive potential between impurities.

Discovery of a density-dependent hopping term affecting phase transitions.

Existence of a triple point in the phase diagram due to long-range attraction.

Abstract

Both mixtures of atomic Bose-Einstein condensates and systems with atoms trapped in optical lattices have been intensely explored theoretically, mainly due to the exceptional developments on the experimental side. We investigate the properties of ultracold atomic impurities (bosons) immersed in a vortex lattice of a second Bose-condensed species. In contrast to the static optical-lattice configuration, the vortex lattice presents intrinsic dynamics given by its Tkachenko modes. These excitations induce additional correlations between the impurities, which consist in a long-range attractive potential and in a density-dependent hopping, described here in the framework of an extended Bose-Hubbard model. We compute the quantum phase diagram of the impurity species through a Gutzwiller ansatz and through the mean-field approach, and separately identify the effects of the two additional terms, i.e., the shift and the deformation of the Mott insulator lobes. The long-range attraction, in particular, induces the existence of a triple point in the phase diagram, in agreement with previous quantum Monte Carlo calculations [Chaviguri \emph{et al.}, Phys. Rev. A \textbf{95}, 053639 (2017)].