Effects of finite temperature on the Mott insulator state

TL;DR

This paper studies how finite temperature affects the density distribution of atomic pairs in a Mott insulator state of ultracold Bose atoms in an optical lattice, using Monte Carlo simulations and a simple model.

Contribution

It introduces a model that accurately describes pair density distributions at low temperatures and proposes using pair statistics to estimate system temperature.

Findings

Temperature influences atomic pair distributions in the Mott insulator.

The model accurately predicts pair densities at low temperatures.

Pair statistics can serve as a temperature measurement tool.

Abstract

We investigate the effects of finite temperature on ultracold Bose atoms confined in an optical lattice plus a parabolic potential in the Mott insulator state. In particular, we analyze the temperature dependence of the density distribution of atomic pairs in the lattice, by means of exact Monte-Carlo simulations. We introduce a simple model that quantitatively accounts for the computed pair density distributions at low enough temperatures. We suggest that the temperature dependence of the atomic pair statistics may be used to estimate the system's temperature at energies of the order of the atoms' interaction energy.