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Suppression of the critical temperature for superfluidity near the Mott transition

Nature Physics volume 6, pages 998–1004 (2010)Cite this article

Abstract

Ultracold atomic gases in optical lattices have proven to be a controllable, tunable and clean implementation of strongly interacting quantum many-body systems. An essential prospect for such quantum simulators is their ability to map out the phase diagram of fundamental many-body model Hamiltonians. However, the results need to be validated first for representative benchmark problems through state-of-the-art numerical methods of quantum many-body theory. Here we present the first ab initio comparison between experiments and quantum Monte Carlo simulations for strongly interacting Bose gases on a lattice for large systems (up to particles). The comparison enables thermometry for the interacting quantum gas and to experimentally determine the finite-temperature phase diagram for bosonic superfluids in an optical lattice, revealing a suppression of the critical temperature as the transition to the Mott insulator is approached.

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Figure 1: Simplified scheme of the finite T phase diagram for a single species of bosons in a lattice potential at density n=1.
Figure 2: Thermodynamic properties of the Bose–Hubbard model at finite temperatures.
Figure 3: Comparison of experimental and simulated TOF distributions.
Figure 4: Fit results for the onset of superfluidity.
Figure 5: Finite temperature phase diagram and suppression of Tc in the lattice.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank B. Capogrosso-Sansone, P. N. Ma, F. C. Zhang, S. Fölling, H. Moritz, T. Esslinger and J. Dalibard for stimulating discussions. This work was supported by the DFG, the SNF, the EU (IP SCALA), DARPA (OLE program) and AFOSR. The simulations were run on the Brutus cluster at the ETH in Zürich.

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Author notes

  1. S. Trotzky and L. Pollet: These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Physik, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, 55099 Mainz, Germany

    S. Trotzky, U. Schnorrberger & I. Bloch

  2. Department of Physics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, USA

    L. Pollet, N. V. Prokof’ev & B. Svistunov

  3. Theoretische Physik, ETH Zurich, CH-8093 Zurich, Switzerland

    L. Pollet & M. Troyer

  4. Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, ENS, UPMC, CNRS, 24 rue Lhomond, 75005 Paris, France

    F. Gerbier

  5. Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik, 85748 Garching, Germany

    I. Bloch

  6. Russian Research Center ‘Kurchatov Institute’, 123182 Moscow, Russia

    N. V. Prokof’ev & B. Svistunov

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  1. S. Trotzky
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Contributions

S.T. and U.S. carried out the experiments and L.P., B.S., M.T. and N.V.P. performed the numerical simulations. S.T., L.P., F.G., N.V.P., B.S. and M.T. were involved in the analysis of the data. All authors conceived the research, discussed the results and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to S. Trotzky.

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Trotzky, S., Pollet, L., Gerbier, F. et al. Suppression of the critical temperature for superfluidity near the Mott transition. Nature Phys 6, 998–1004 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1799

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