Interference-Induced Suppression of Doublon Transport and Prethermalization in the Extended Bose-Hubbard Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a disorder-free method to suppress doublon transport in the extended Bose-Hubbard model, achieving near-complete dynamical arrest and revealing a prethermal plateau through analytical and numerical analysis.

Contribution

It proposes an optimized pair-hopping scheme that destructively interferes with virtual hopping, enabling control over doublon mobility and prethermalization in strongly interacting systems.

Findings

Near-complete dynamical arrest in 1D chains

Significant suppression of ballistic spreading in 2D lattices

Identification of a prethermal density-wave plateau

Abstract

The coherent mobility of doublons, arising from second-order virtual dissociation-recombination processes, fundamentally limits their use as information carriers in the strongly interacting Bose-Hubbard model. We propose a disorder-free suppression mechanism by introducing an optimized nearest-neighbor pair-hopping term that destructively interferes with the dominant virtual hopping channel. Using the third-order Schrieffer-Wolff transformation, we derive an analytical optimal condition that accounts for lattice geometry corrections. Exact numerical simulations demonstrate that this optimized scheme achieves near-complete dynamical arrest and entanglement preservation in one-dimensional chains, while in two-dimensional square lattices, it significantly suppresses ballistic spreading yet permits a slow residual expansion. Furthermore, in the many-body regime, finite-size scaling analysis identifies the observed long-lived density-wave order as a prethermal plateau emerging from the dramatic separation of microscopic and thermalization timescales.