Non-local correlation and entanglement of ultracold bosons in the two-dimensional Bose-Hubbard lattice at finite temperature

TL;DR

This paper studies how temperature affects the phase transitions of ultracold bosons in a 2D optical lattice, using cluster mean-field theory to accurately predict phase boundaries and entanglement properties near critical points.

Contribution

The authors develop a finite-cluster mean-field approach that accurately predicts phase boundaries and entanglement entropy in the 2D Bose-Hubbard model at finite temperature, aligning with quantum Monte Carlo results.

Findings

Quantitative agreement of phase boundaries with QMC and experiments.

Entanglement entropy correlates with system entropy and peaks near critical points.

Transition lines near quantum critical points are characterized and discussed.

Abstract

We investigate the temperature-dependent behavior emerging in the vicinity of the superfluid (SF) to Mott-insulator (MI) transition of interacting bosons in a two-dimensional optical lattice, described by the Bose-Hubbard model. The equilibrium phase diagram at finite temperature is computed using the cluster mean-field (CMF) theory including a finite cluster-size scaling. The SF, MI, and normal fluid (NF) phases are characterized as well as the transition or crossover temperatures between them are estimated by computing physical quantities such as the superfluid fraction, compressibility and sound velocity using the CMF method. We find that the non-local correlations included in a finite cluster, when extrapolated to infinite size, leads to quantitative agreement of the phase boundaries with quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) results as well as with experiments. Moreover, we show that the von Neumann entanglement entropy within a cluster corresponds to the system's entropy density and that it is enhanced near the SF-MI quantum critical point (QCP) and at the SF- NF boundary. The behavior of the transition lines near this QCP, at and away from the particle-hole (p-h) symmetric point located at the Mott-tip, is also discussed. Our results obtained by using the CMF theory can be tested experimentally using the quantum gas microscopy method.