Searching for a Supersolid in Cold Atom Optical Lattices

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to detect supersolid phases in cold atom optical lattices using noise correlations, accounting for trapping potential effects, and identifies key experimental signatures.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical approach to observe supersolids in extended Bose-Hubbard models considering trapping potential effects.

Findings

Noise correlations can identify supersolid and density wave phases.

Noise correlation peak width scales inversely with trapped Mott domain size.

Trapping potential effects are crucial for interpreting experimental data.

Abstract

We suggest a technique for the observation of a predicted supersolid phase in extended Bose-Hubbard models which are potentially realizable in cold atom optical lattice systems. In particular, we discuss important subtleties arising from the existence of the trapping potential which leads to an externally imposed (as opposed to spontaneous) breaking of translational invariance. We show, by carefully including the trapping potential in our theoretical formalism, that noise correlations could prove instrumental in identifying the supersolid and density wave phases. We also find that the noise correlation peak width scales inversely with the relative size of trapped Mott domains.