Stability of the replica-symmetric solution in the off-diagonally-disordered Bose-Hubbard model

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the stability of the replica-symmetric solution in a disordered Bose-Hubbard model with random tunneling, identifying conditions under which different phases are stable or unstable.

Contribution

It derives the stability condition for the replica-symmetric solution in a disordered Bose-Hubbard model using the de Almeida-Thouless scheme and numerical eigenvalue analysis.

Findings

Disordered phase is stable.

Glass phase is unstable.

Superfluid phase has both stable and unstable regions.

Abstract

We study a disordered system of interacting bosons described by the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian with random tunneling amplitudes. We derive the condition for the stability of the replica-symmetric solution for this model. Following the scheme of de Almeida and Thouless, we determine if the solution corresponds to the minimum of free energy by building the respective Hessian matrix and checking its positive semidefiniteness. Thus, we find the eigenvalues by postulating the set of eigenvectors based on their expected symmetry, and require the eigenvalues to be non-negative. We evaluate the spectrum numerically and identify matrix blocks that give rise to eigenvalues that are always non-negative. Thus, we find a subset of eigenvalues coming from decoupled subspaces that is sufficient to be checked as the stability criterion. We also determine the stability of the phases present in the system, finding that the disordered phase is stable, the glass phase is unstable, while the superfluid phase has both stable and unstable parts.