Related papers: Mott transition in anharmonic confinement
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…
The coexistence of superfluid and Mott insulator, due to the quadratic confinement potential in current optical lattice experiments, makes the accurate detection of the superfluid-Mott transition difficult. Studying alternative trapping…
For a system at a temperature of absolute zero, all thermal fluctuations are frozen out, while quantum fluctuations prevail. These microscopic quantum fluctuations can induce a macroscopic phase transition in the ground state of a many-body…
Vortex configurations in rotating Bose-Einstein condensed gases trapped in power-law and anharmonic potentials are studied. When the confining potential is steeper than harmonic in the plane perpendicular to the axis of rotation, vortices…
We show that the measure of the so-called {\it release-energy}, which is an experimentally accessible quantity, makes it possible to assess the value of the Mott gap in the presence of the confinement potential that is unavoidable in the…
Between mirrors, the density of electromagnetic modes differs from the one in free space. This changes the radiation properties of an atom as well as the light forces acting on an atom. It has profound consequences in the strong-coupling…
We theoretically study the optical properties of a gas of ultracold, coherently dressed three-level atoms in a Mott insulator phase of an optical lattice. The vacuum state, the band dispersion and the absorption spectrum of the polariton…
Mott insulators provide stable quantum states and long coherence times to due to small number fluctuations, making them good candidates for quantum memory and atomic circuits. We propose a proof-of-principle for a 1D Mott switch using an…
We propose a method to probe states in the Mott insulator regime produced from a condensate in an optical lattice. We consider a system in which we create time-dependent number fluctuations in a given site by turning off the atomic…
Cold atoms confined in periodic potentials are remarkably versatile quantum systems for implementing simple models prevalent in condensed matter theory. In the current experiment, we realize the 2D Bose-Hubbard model by loading a…
A phase transition for bosonic atoms in a two-dimensional anisotropic optical lattice is considered. If the tunnelling rates in two directions are different, the system can undergo a transition between a two-dimensional superfluid and a…
We study theoretically the Mott metal-insulator transition for a system of fermionic atoms confined in a three-dimensional optical lattice and a harmonic trap. We describe an inhomogeneous system of several thousand sites using an…
The superfluid to Mott insulator transition in cavity polariton arrays is analyzed using the variational cluster approach, taking into account quantum fluctuations exactly on finite length scales. Phase diagrams in one and two dimensions…
We introduce a new technique to probe the properties of an interacting cold atomic gas that can be viewed as a dynamical compressibility measurement. We apply this technique to the study of the superfluid to Mott insulator quantum phase…
Quantized vortices stunningly illustrate the coherent nature of a superfluid Bose condensate of alkali atoms. Introducing an optical lattice depletes this coherence. Consequently, novel vortex physics may emerge in an experiment on a…
An ultracold gas of coupled two-component atoms in an optical field is studied. Due to the internal two-level structure of the atoms, three competing energy terms exist; atomic kinetic, atomic internal, and atom-atom interaction energies. A…
We present a theoretical study of vortices within a harmonically trapped Bose-Einstein condensate in a rotating optical lattice. We find that proximity to the Mott insulating state dramatically effects the vortex structures. To illustrate…
We investigate the effect of mass imbalance in binary Fermi mixtures loaded in optical lattices. Using dynamical mean-field theory, we study the transition from a fluid to a Mott insulator driven by the repulsive interactions. For almost…
A two-dimensional system of atoms in an anisotropic optical lattice is studied theoretically. If the system is finite in one direction, it is shown to exhibit a transition between a two-dimensional superfluid and a one-dimensional Mott…
Photoluminescence spectra measured on a type-II GaSb/GaAs quantum dot ensemble at high excitation power indicate a Mott transition from the low density state comprising of spatially-indirect excitons to a high density electron-plasma state.…