We study collective modes and superfluidity of spin-1 bosons with antiferromagnetic interactions in an optical lattice based on the time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau (TDGL) equation derived from the spin-1 Bose-Hubbard model. Specifically, we examine the stability of supercurrents in the polar phase in the vicinity of the Mott insulating phase with even filling factors. Solving the linearized TDGL equation, we obtain gapless spin-nematic modes and gapful spin-wave modes in the polar phase that arise due to the breaking of $S^2$ symmetry in spin space. Supercurrents exhibit dynamical instabilities induced by growing collective modes. In contrast to the second-order phase transition, the critical momentum of mass currents is finite at the phase boundary of the first-order superfluid-Mott insulator (SF-MI) phase transition. Furthermore, the critical momentum remains finite throughout the metastable SF phase and approaches zero towards the phase boundary, at which the metastable SF state disappears. We also study the stability of spin currents motivated by recent experiments for spinor gases. The critical momentum of spin currents is found to be zero, where a spin-nematic mode causes the dynamical instability. We investigate the origin of the zero critical momentum of spin currents and find it attributed to the fact that the polar state becomes energetically unstable even in the presence of an infinitesimal spin current. We discuss implications of the zero critical momentum of spin currents for the stability of the polar state.
The dc Josephson effect provides a powerful phase-sensitive tool for investigating superfluid order parameters. We report on the observation of dc Josephson supercurrents in strongly interacting fermionic superfluids across a tunnelling barrier in the absence of any applied potential difference. For sufficiently strong barriers, we observe a sinusoidal current-phase relation, in agreement with Josephson's seminal prediction. We map out the zero-resistance state and its breakdown as a function of junction parameters, extracting the Josephson critical current behaviour. By comparing our results …
The paper investigates the coexistence and interplay of spin and mass superfluidity in a ferromagnetic spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate. Superfluidity is possible only in the presence of uniaxial anisotropy (linear and quadratic Zeeman effect). This follows from the topology of the order-parameter space (vacuum manifold). According to the Landau criterion, the critical phase gradients, both for mass and spin supercurrents, vanish at the phase transition from the easy-plane to the easy-axis anisotropy. However, mass superfluidity is still possible at the phase transition. This is because the Lan…
We study the condensate dynamics of the so-called entangled Bose-Einstein condensation (EBEC), which is the ground state of a mixture of two species of pseudospin-$\frac{1}{2}$ atoms with interspecies spin-exchange scattering in certain parameter regimes. EBEC leads to four inter-dependent superfluid components, each corresponding to the orbital wave function associated with a spin component of a species. The four superflows have various counter-relations, and altogether lead to a conserved total supercurrent and a conserved total spin supercurrent. In the homogenous case, we also obtain the e…
We discuss an idea to realize a spontaneous current in a superfluid Fermi gas. When a polarized Fermi superfluid ($N_\up > N_\dwn$, where $N_σ$ is the number of atoms in the hyperfine state described by pseudospin $σ=\uparrow, \downarrow$.) is loaded onto a ring-shaped trap with a weak potential barrier, some of excess atoms ($ΔN=N_\uparrow-N_\downarrow$) are localized around the barrier. As shown in our previous paper [T. Kashimura, S. Tsuchiya, and Y. Ohashi, Phys. Rev. A \textbf{82}, 033617 (2010)], this polarized potential barrier works as a $π$-junction in the sense that the superfluid or…
We investigate tunneling properties of collective excitations in the ferromagnetic phase of a spin-1 spinor Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). In addition to the Bogoliubov mode, this superfluid phase has two spin excitations, namely, the gapless transverse spin wave and the quadrupolar mode with a finite excitation gap. In the mean-field theory at T=0, we examine how these collective modes tunnel through a barrier potential that couples to the local density of particles. In the presence of supercurrent with a finite momentum $q$, while the Bogoliubov mode shows the so-called anomalous tunneling …
We study the time evolution of a supercurrent imprinted on a one-dimensional ring of interacting bosons in the presence of a defect created by a localized barrier. Depending on interaction strength and temperature, we identify various dynamical regimes where the current oscillates, is self-trapped or decays with time. We show that the dynamics are captured by a dual Josephson model and involve phase slips of thermal or quantum nature.
Persistent currents in annular geometries have played an important role in disclosing the quantum phase coherence of superconductors and mesoscopic electronic systems. Ultracold atomic gases in multiply connected traps also exhibit long-lived supercurrents, and have attracted much interest both for fundamental studies of superfluid dynamics and as prototypes for atomtronic circuits. Here, we report on the realization of supercurrents in homogeneous, tunable fermionic rings. We gain exquisite, rapid control over quantized persistent currents in all regimes of the BCS-BEC crossover through a uni…
We explore novel features of a nonrelativistic fermionic superfluid in which the pairing interaction includes a contribution from the exchange of a dynamical bosonic mode. We show that the dynamical boson exchange (DBE), which causes a retarded pairing interaction and thus violates the Galilean invariance of the fermion sector, generically leads to a quantum reduction of the superfluid density and hence a nonzero normal fraction even at zero temperature. For spin-singlet pairing, the DBE also leads to a nonvanishing spin susceptibility at zero temperature, providing a mechanism for the coexist…
We analyze the finite-temperature phase diagram of the boson-fermion-Hubbard model with Feshbach converting interaction, using the coherent-state path-integral method. We show that depending on the position of the bosonic band, this type of interaction, even if weak, can drive the system into the resonant superfluid phase in the strong bosonic interaction limit. It turns out that this phase can exist for an arbitrary number of fermions (i.e., fermionic concentration between 0 and 2) but with the bosonic particle number very close to an integer value. We point out that the standard time-of-flig…
We show that the dynamics of cold bosonic atoms in a two-dimensional square optical lattice produced by a bichromatic light-shift potential is described by a Bose-Hubbard model with an additional effective staggered magnetic field. In addition to the known uniform superfluid and Mott insulating phases, the zero-temperature phase diagram exhibits a novel kind of finite-momentum superfluid phase, characterized by a quantized staggered rotational flux. An extension for fermionic atoms leads to an anisotropic Dirac spectrum, which is relevant to graphene and high-$T_c$ superconductors.
We present a mathematically rigorous analysis of the superfluid properties of a Bose-Einstein condensate in the many-body ground state of a one-dimensional model of interacting bosons in a random potential.
We analyze theoretically the emergence of different superfluid phases of spin-1 bosons in a three-dimensional cubic optical lattice by generalizing the recently developed Ginzburg-Landau theory for the Bose-Hubbard model to a spinor Bose gas. In particular at zero temperature, our theory distinguishes within its validity range between various superfluid phases for an anti-ferromagnetic interaction with an external magnetic field. In addition, we determine that the superfluid-Mott insulator phase transition is of second order and that the transitions between the respective superfluid phases wit…
Using boson-vortex duality, we formulate a low-energy effective theory of a two-dimensional vortex lattice in a bosonic Galilean-invariant compressible superfluid. The excitation spectrum contains a gapped Kohn mode and an elliptically polarized Tkachenko mode that has quadratic dispersion relation at low momenta. External rotation breaks parity and time-reversal symmetries and gives rise to Hall responses. We extract the particle number current and stress tensor linear responses and investigate the relations between them that follow from Galilean symmetry. We argue that elementary particles a…
We study the superfluid density of hard-core bosons on quasi-one-dimensional lattices using the quantum Monte Carlo method. Because of phase slippage, the superfluid density drops quickly to zero at finite temperatures with increasing the system length $\ell$ and the superfluid transition temperature is zero in one spatial dimension and also in quasi-one dimension in the limit of $\ell\rightarrow\infty$. We calculate the superfluid density of a model where no phase slippage is allowed and show that the superfluid density remains finite at finite temperatures even in the one-dimensional limit. …
We consider a mixture of two bosonic species with tunable interspecies interaction in a periodic potential and discuss the advantages of low filling factors on the detection of the pair-superfluid phase. We show how the emergence of such a phase can be put dramatically into evidence by looking at the interference pictures and density correlations after expansion and by changing the interspecies interaction from attractive to repulsive.
In this article, we calculate the friction between two counter-flowing bosonic and fermionic super-fluids. In the limit where the boson-boson and boson-fermion interactions can be treated within the mean-field approximation, we show that the force can be related to the dynamical structure factor of the fermionic component. Finally, we provide asymptotic expressions for weakly and strongly attractive fermions and show that the damping rate obeys simple scaling laws close to the critical velocity.
We use a path integral approach to calculate the superfluid density of a Bose lattice gas in the limit where the number of atoms per site is large. Our analytical expressions agree with numerical results on small systems for low temperatures and relatively weak interactions. We also calculate the superfluid density and drag for two-component lattice bosons. To attain the correct results we develop tools for calculating discrete time path integrals. These tools should be broadly applicable to a range of systems which are naturally described within an overcomplete basis.
Topological superfluids are of technological relevance since they are believed to host Majorana bound states, a powerful resource for quantum computation and memory. Here we propose to realize topological superfluidity with fermionic atoms in an optical lattice. We consider a situation where atoms in two internal states experience different lattice potentials: one species is localized and the other itinerant, and show how quantum fluctuations of the localized fermions give rise to an attraction and strong spin-orbit coupling in the itinerant band. At low temperature, these effects stabilize a …
Synthetic spin-orbit coupling in ultracold atomic gases can be taken to extremes rarely found in solids. We study a two dimensional Hubbard model of bosons in an optical lattice in the presence of spin-orbit coupling strong enough to drive direct transitions from Mott insulators to superfluids. Here we find phase-modulated superfluids with finite momentum that are generated entirely by spin-orbit coupling. We investigate the rich phase patterns of the superfluids, which may be directly probed using time-of-flight imaging of the spin-dependent momentum distribution.
We report the observation of many-body interaction effects for a homonuclear bosonic mixture in a three-dimensional optical lattice with variable state dependence along one axis. Near the superfluid-to-Mott insulator transition for one component, we find that the presence of a second component can reduce the apparent superfluid coherence, most significantly when it either experiences a strongly localizing lattice potential or none at all. We examine this effect by varying the relative populations and lattice depths, and discuss the observed behavior in view of recent proposals for scattering f…
We analyze theoretically a spinor Bose gas loaded into a three-dimensional cubic optical lattice. In order to account for different superfluid phases of spin-1 bosons in the presence of an external magnetic field, we work out a Ginzburg-Landau theory for the underlying spin-1 Bose-Hubbard model. In particular at zero temperature, we determine both the Mott and the superfluid phases for the competition between the anti-ferromagnetic interaction and the linear Zeeman effect within the validity range of the Ginzburg-Landau theory. Moreover, we find that the phase transition between the superfluid…
We study a mixture of one-dimensional bosons and spinless fermions at incommensurate filling using phenomenological bosonization and Green's functions techniques. We derive the relation between the parameters of the microscopic Hamiltonian and macroscopic observables. Galilean invariance results in extra constraints for the current current interactions. We obtain the exact exponents for the various response functions, and show that superfluid fluctuations are enhanced by the effective boson-fermion density-density interaction and suppressed by the effective boson-fermion current-current intera…
Motivated by recent observations (P. Soltan-Panahi {\it et al.}, Nature Physics {\bf 8}, 71-75 (2012)), we study the stability of a Bose-Einstein Condensate within a spin-dependent honeycomb lattice towards forming a "Twisted Superfluid" state. Our exhaustive numerical search fails to find this phase, pointing to possible non-mean field physics.
We use optical images of a superfluid consisting of a weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensate of sodium atoms to investigate the structure of quantized three-dimensional vortex filaments. We find that the measured optical contrast and the width of the vortex core quantitatively agree with the predictions of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation.
We examine the equilibrium properties of lattice bosons with attractive on-site interactions in the presence of a three-body hard-core constraint that stabilizes the system against collapse and gives rise to a dimer superfluid phase formed by virtual hopping processes of boson pairs. Employing quantum Monte Carlo simulations, the ground state phase diagram of this system on the square lattice is analyzed. In particular, we study the quantum phase transition between the atomic and dimer superfluid regime and analyze the nature of the superfluid-insulator transitions. Evidence is provided for th…
In this letter we study finite temperature properties of spin-1/2 interacting bosons with spin-orbit coupling in two dimensions. When the ground state has stripe order, we show that thermal fluctuations will first melt the stripe order and lead to a superfluid of boson pairs if the spin-orbit coupling is isotropic or nearly isotropic. Such a phase supports fractionalized quantum vortices. The Kosterlize-Thouless transition from superfluid to normal state is driven by proliferation of half vortices. When the ground state is a plane wave state, the transition to normal state is driven by convent…
We investigate the zero-temperature excitation spectrum of two-dimensional soft-core bosons for a wide range parameters and across the phase transition from a superfluid to a supersolid state. Based on mean field calculations and recent Quantum Monte Carlo results, we demonstrate the applicability of the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations, even at high interaction strengths where the system forms an insulating cluster crystal. Interestingly, our study reveals that the maximum energy of the longitudinal phonon band in the supersolid phase connects to the maxon energy of the superfluid at the phase …
We examine the superfluid properties of a 1D Bose gas in a ring trap based on the model of Lieb and Liniger. While the 1D Bose gas has nonclassical rotational inertia and exhibits quantization of velocities, the metastability of currents depends sensitively on the strength of interactions in the gas: the stronger the interactions, the faster the current decays. It is shown that the Landau critical velocity is zero in the thermodynamic limit due to the first supercurrent state, which has zero energy and finite probability of excitation. We calculate the energy dissipation rate of ring currents …
We analyze the superfluid phase transition of harmonically confined bosons with long-range interaction in both two and three dimensions in a broad parameter range from weak to strong coupling. We observe that the onset of superfluidity occurs in $3D$ at significantly lower temperatures compared to $2D$. This is demonstrated to be a quantum degeneracy effect. In addition, the spatial distribution of superfluidity across the shells of the clusters is investigated. It is found that superfluidity is substantially reduced in the outer layers due to increased correlation effects.
We consider the ground state of a bilayer system of dipolar bosons, where dipoles are oriented by an external field in the direction perpendicular to the parallel planes. Quantum Monte Carlo methods are used to calculate the ground-state energy, the one-body and two-body density matrix, and the superfluid response as a function of the separation between layers. We find that by decreasing the interlayer distance for fixed value of the strength of the dipolar interaction, the system undergoes a quantum phase transition from a single-particle to a pair superfluid. The single-particle superfluid i…
Motivated by recent advance in orbitally tuned Feshbach resonance experiments, we analyze the ground-state phase diagram and related low-energy excitation spectra of a d-wave interacting Bose gas. A two-channel model with d-wave symmetric interactions and background s-wave interactions is adopted to characterize the gas. The ground state is found to show three interesting phases: atomic, molecular, and atomic-molecular superfluidity. Remarkably differently from what was previously known in the p-wave case, the atomic superfluid is found to be momentum-independent in the present d-wave case. Bo…
We study the effects of spin-orbit coupling on the Mott-superfluid transition of bosons in a one-dimensional optical lattice. We determine the strong coupling magnetic phase diagram by a combination of exact analytic and numerical means. Smooth evolution of the magnetic structure into the superfluid phases are investigated with the density matrix renormalization group technique. Novel magnetic phases are uncovered and phase transitions between them within the superfluid regime are discussed. Possible experimental detection are discussed.
We develop a strong-coupling ($t \ll U$) expansion technique for calculating the density profile for bosonic atoms trapped in an optical lattice with an overall harmonic trap at finite temperature and finite on site interaction in the presence of superfluid regions. Our results match well with quantum Monte Carlo simulations at finite temperature. We also show that the superfluid order parameter never vanishes in the trap due to proximity effect. Our calculations for the scaled density in the vacuum to superfluid transition agree well with the experimental data for appropriate temperatures. We…
The phenomenon of stable persistent currents is central to the studies of superfluidity in a range of physical systems. While all of the previous theoretical studies of superfluid flows in annular geometries concentrated on conservative systems, here we extend the stability analysis of persistent currents to open-dissipative exciton-polariton superfluids. By considering an exciton-polariton condensate in an optically-induced annular trap, we determine stability conditions for an initially imposed flow with a non-zero orbital angular momentum. We show, theoretically and numerically, that the sy…
We study the response of trapped two dimensional cold bosons to time dependent lattices. We find that in lattice ramps from 11 (superfluid, $\hbar/U_{\text{i}} = 3$ms, $\hbar/J_{\text{i}} = 45$ms) to 16 recoils (Mott, $\hbar/U_{\text{f}} = 2$ms, $\hbar/J_{\text{f}} = 130$ms) the local number fluctuations remains at their equilibrium values if ramps are slower than 3 ms. Global transport, however, is much slower (1s), especially in the presence of Mott shells. This separation of timescales has practical implications for cold atom experiments and cooling protocols.
We systematically investigate the zero temperature phase diagram of bosons interacting via dipolar interactions in three dimensions in free space via path integral Monte Carlo simulations with few hundreds of particles and periodic boundary conditions based on the worm algorithm. Upon increasing the strength of the dipolar interaction and at sufficiently high densities we find a wide region where filaments are stabilized along the direction of the external field. Most interestingly by computing the superfluid fraction we conclude that superfluidity is anisotropic and is greatly suppressed alon…
In this paper, we study phase diagrams of dipolar hard-core boson gases on the honeycomb lattice. The system is described by the Haldane-Bose-Hubbard model with complex hopping amplitudes and the nearest neighbor repulsion. By using the slave-particle representation of the hard-core bosons and also the path-integral quantum Monte-Carlo simulations, we investigate the system and to show that the systems have a rich phase diagram. There are Mott, superfluid, chiral superfluid, and sublattice chiral superfluid phases as well as the density-wave phase. We also found that there exists a coexisting …
We study an effective model of two interacting species of bosons in two dimensions, which is amenable to sign problem free Monte Carlo simulations. In addition to conventional ground states, we access a paired superfluid which is also a topological phase, protected by the remaining $U(1) \times \mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry. This phase arises from the condensation of a composite object, the bound state of vortices and anti-vortices of one species, to a boson of the second species. We introduce a bulk response function, the Ising analog of the quantized Hall effect, to diagnose the topological phase. …
We propose to realize an exotic Haldane superfluid (HSF) phase in an extended Bose-Hubbard model on the two-leg ladder (i.e., a two-species mixture of interacting bosons). The proposal is confirmed by means of large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations, with a significant part of the ground-state phase diagram being revealed. Most remarkably, the newly discovered HSF phase features both superfluidity and the non-local topological Haldane order. The effects induced by varying the number of legs are furthermore explored. Our results shed light on how topological superfluid emerges in bosonic sy…
In this letter we consider spinless bosons in a Kagome lattice with nearest-neighbor hopping and on-site interaction, and the sign of hopping is inverted by insetting a π flux in each triangle of Kagome lattice so that the lowest single particle band is perfectly flat. We show that in the high density limit, despite of the infinite degeneracy of the single particle ground states, interaction will select out the Bloch state at the K point of Brillouin zone for boson condensation at the lowest temperature. As temperature increases, the single boson superfluid order can be easily destroyed, while…
In the present paper, we study finite-temperature phase structure of two-component hard-core bosons in a cubic optical lattice. The system that we study in the present paper is an effective model for the Bose-Hubbard model with strong on-site repulsions and is called bosonic t-J model. This model is a bosonic counterpart of the t-J model for the strongly-correlated electron systems like the high-temperature superconducting materials. We study the model by means of path-integral methods and Monte-Carlo simulations. We found that this system has a very rich phase structure including checkerboard…
We study superfluid to Anderson insulator transition of strongly repulsive Bose gas in a one dimensional incommensurate optical lattice. In the hard core limit, the Bose-Fermi mapping allows us to deal with the system exactly by using the exact numerical method. Based on the Aubry-André model, we exploit the phase transition of the hard core boson system from superfluid phase with all the single particle states being extended to the Bose glass phase with all the single particle states being Anderson localized as the strength of the incommensurate potential increasing relative to the amplitude …
We propose an analogy between the quantum physics of a black hole in its late stages of the evaporation process and a superfluid Bose Einstein Condensate (BEC), based on the Horowitz and Maldacena quantum final state projection model [JHEP 2004(02), 008]. The superfluid region is considered to be analogous to the interior of a black hole, and the normal fluid/superfluid interface is compared to the event horizon of a black hole. We theoretically investigate the possibility of recovering the wavefunction of particles incident on a superfluid BEC from the normal fluid, facilitated by the mode co…
We study two-component (or pseudospin-1/2) bosons with pair hopping interactions in synthetic dimension, for which a feasible experimental scheme on a square optical lattice is also presented. Previous studies have shown that two-component bosons with on-site interspecies interaction can only generate nontrivial interspecies paired superfluid (super-counter-fluidity or pair-superfluid) state. In contrast, apart from interspecies paired superfluid, we reveal two new phases by considering this additional pair hopping interaction. These novel phases are intraspecies paired superfluid (molecular s…
We discuss a model of dipolar bosons trapped in a weakly coupled planar array of one-dimensional tubes. We consider the situation where the dipolar moments are aligned by an external field, and find a rich phase diagram as a function of the angle of this field exhibiting quantum phase transitions between solid, superfluid and supersolid phases. In the low energy limit, the model turns out to be identical to one describing quasi-one-dimensional superconductivity in condensed matter systems. This opens the possibility of using bosons as a quantum analogue simulator of electronic systems, a scena…
We extend the variational cluster approach to deal with strongly correlated lattice bosons in the superfluid phase. To this end, we reformulate the approach within a pseudoparticle formalism, whereby cluster excitations are described by particlelike excitations. The approximation amounts to solving a multicomponent noninteracting bosonic system by means of a multimode Bogoliubov approximation. A source-and-drain term is introduced in order to break U(1) symmetry at the cluster level. We provide an expression for the grand potential, the single-particle normal and anomalous Green's functions, t…
Entanglement entropy (EE), a fundamental conception in quantum information for characterizing entanglement, has been extensively employed to explore quantum phase transitions (QPTs). Although the conventional single-site mean-field (MF) approach successfully predicts the emergence of QPTs, it fails to include any entanglement. Here, for the first time, in the framework of a cluster MF treatment, we extract the signature of EE in the bosonic superfluid-insulator transitions. We consider a trimerized Kagome lattice of interacting bosons, in which each trimer is treated as a cluster, and implemen…
