Nonperturbative renormalization group approach to strongly correlated lattice bosons

Abstract

We present a nonperturbative renormalization-group approach to the Bose-Hubbard model. By taking as initial condition of the renormalization-group flow the (local) limit of decoupled sites, we take into account both local and long-distance fluctuations in a nontrivial way. This approach yields a phase diagram in very good quantitative agreement with quantum Monte Carlo simulations, and reproduces the two universality classes of the superfluid--Mott-insulator transition. The critical behavior near the multicritical points, where the transition takes place at constant density, agrees with the original predictions of Fisher {\it et al.} [Phys. Rev. B {\bf 40}, 546 (1989)] based on simple scaling arguments. At a generic transition point, the critical behavior is mean-field like with logarithmic corrections in two dimensions. In the weakly-correlated superfluid phase (far away from the Mott insulating phase), the renormalization-group flow is controlled by the Bogoliubov fixed point down to a characteristic (Ginzburg) momentum scale $k_G$ which is much smaller than the inverse healing length $k_h$. In the vicinity of the multicritical points, when the density is commensurate, we identify a sharp crossover from a weakly- to a strongly-correlated superfluid phase where the condensate density and the superfluid stiffness are strongly suppressed and both $k_G$ and $k_h$ are of the order of the inverse lattice spacing.