Commensurate-incommensurate transition of cold atoms in an optical lattice
Soft Condensed Matter
2009-11-07 v1 Statistical Mechanics
Abstract
An atomic gas subject to a commensurate periodic potential generated by an optical lattice undergoes a superfluid--Mott insulator transition. Confining a strongly interacting gas to one dimension generates an instability where an arbitrary weak potential is sufficient to pin the atoms into the Mott state; here, we derive the corresponding phase diagram. The commensurate pinned state may be detected via its finite excitation gap and the Bragg peaks in the static structure factor.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0208391,
title = {Commensurate-incommensurate transition of cold atoms in an optical lattice},
author = {H. P. Büchler and G. Blatter and W. Zwerger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0208391},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 2 figures