Superfluid-Insulator Transition of Interacting Multi-Component Bosons

TL;DR

This paper investigates superfluid-insulator transitions in two-component lattice bosons, revealing continuous phase transitions and a mass enhancement mechanism linked to component ordering.

Contribution

It combines mean-field and quantum Monte Carlo methods to analyze phase transitions and introduces a novel mass enhancement mechanism related to component order.

Findings

Transitions are continuous despite phase separation.

Component order suppresses superfluidity and increases effective mass.

Mass enhancement occurs even away from Mott insulator at n=1.

Abstract

Various types of superfluid-insulator transitions are investigated for two-component lattice boson systems in two dimensions with on-site hard-core repulsion and the component-dependent intersite interaction. The mean-field phase diagram is obtained by the Gutzwiller-type variational technique in the plane of filling and interaction parameters. Various ground-state properties are also studied by the quantum Monte Carlo method. Our model exhibits two types of diagonal long-range orders; the density order around the density $n=1/2$ and the Ising-type component order near $n=1$. The quantum Monte Carlo results for the transitions from the superfluid state to these two ordered states show marked contrast with the Gutzwiller results. Namely, although they are both accompanied by phase separation into commensurate ($n=1/2$ or $n=1$) and incommensurate density phases, these transitions are both continuous. The continuous growth of the component correlation severely suppresses the superfluidity as well as the inverse of the effective mass in the critical region of the component order transition in contrast to the persistence of the superfluidity in the density-ordered state. We propose a mechanism of the mass enhancement observed even far from the Mott insulating filling $n=1$, when the Ising-type component order persists into $n \neq 1$. Possible relevance of this type of mass enhancement in other systems is also discussed.