A study on quantum gases: bosons in optical lattices and the one-dimensional interacting Bose gas

TL;DR

This paper develops degenerate perturbation methods for bosonic systems in optical lattices and analyzes the universal momentum distribution decay in strongly interacting one-dimensional Bose gases, providing analytical insights and comparisons with simulations.

Contribution

It introduces two degenerate perturbative approaches for the Bose-Hubbard model near phase boundaries and derives an analytical formula for Tan's contact in the Tonks-Girardeau regime.

Findings

Degenerate perturbation methods improve phase boundary analysis.

Analytical formula for Tan's contact in strongly interacting regime.

Comparison of analytical results with quantum Monte Carlo simulations.

Abstract

Bosonic atoms confined in optical lattices are described by the Bose-Hubbard model and can exist in two different phases, Mott insulator or superfluid, depending on the strength of the system parameters. In the vicinity of the phase boundary, there are degeneracies that occur between every two adjacent Mott lobes. Because of this, nondegenerate perturbation theory fails to give meaningful results for the condensate density: it predicts a phase transition in a point of the phase diagram where no transition occurs. Motivated by this, we develop two different degenerate perturbative methods to solve the degeneracy-related problems. Moreover, we study the one-dimensional repulsively interacting Bose gas under harmonic confinement, with special attention to the asymptotic behavior of the momentum distribution, which is a universal $k^{-4}$ decay characterized by the Tan's contact. The latter constitutes a direct signature of the short-range correlations in such an interacting system and provides valuable insights about the role of the interparticle interactions. We investigate the system constituted of $N$ interacting particles in the strongly interacting limit. In such a regime, the strong interparticle interaction makes the bosons behave similarly to the ideal Fermi gas. Because of the difficulty in analytically solving the system for $N$ particles at finite interaction, the Tonks-Girardeau regime provides a favorable scenario to probe the contact. Therefore, we are able to provide an analytical formula for the Tan's contact. Furthermore, we analyze the scaling properties of the Tan's contact in terms of $N$ in the high-temperature regime as well as in the strongly interacting regime. Finally, we compare our analytical calculations of the Tan's contact to quantum Monte Carlo simulations and discuss some fundamental differences between the canonical and the grand-canonical ensembles.