Mott Transition for Strongly-Interacting 1D Bosons in a Shallow Periodic Potential

Abstract : We investigate the superfluid-insulator transition of one-dimensional interacting Bosons in both deep and shallow periodic potentials. We compare a theoretical analysis based on Monte-Carlo simulations in continuum space and Luttinger liquid approach with experiments on ultracold atoms with tunable interactions and optical lattice depth. Experiments and theory are in excellent agreement. It provides a quantitative determination of the critical parameter for the Mott transition and defines the regime of validity of widely used approximate models, namely the Bose-Hubbard and sine-Gordon models.