Quantum rotor description of the bosonic superfluid–Mott insulator transition in optical lattices

Abstract

AbstractThe physics of the Bose–Hubbard (BH) model is the subject of intensive studies in recent years, since it has been realized that BH Hamiltonian can be applied to systems of cold atoms confined in periodic optical lattice potential, where the effects on interactions are strongly enhanced. Our aim is to extend the widely used mean‐field treatment of the superfluid–Mott insulator (SF–MI) transition in the BH model. Our method also improves the strong‐coupling expansion that works well only for sufficiently large insulating gap. The key point of the approach is to consider the representation of strongly interacting bosons as particles with attached U(1) gauge group flux tubes, which constitutes the quantum rotor description. The effective action formalism allows us to cast the problem in terms of the phaseonly action and obtain an analytical formulas for critical lines. Finally, we calculate the zero‐temperature SF–MI phase diagrams for three‐dimensional BH model and compare our results with the outcome of numerical Monte Carlo simulations. We found a very good agreement for the quantitative results regarding the details of the lobe in the phase diagrams showing the quantum transition from superfluid to the Mott insulating phase (© 2009 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)