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

Guilhem Boéris (1) , Lorenzo Gori (2) , Marteen D. Hoogerland (3) , Avinash Kumar (2) , Eleonora Lucioni (2) , Luca Tanzi (2) , Massimo Inguscio (2, 4) , Thierry Giamarchi (5) , Chiara D 'Errico (2) , Giuseppe Carleo (1) , Giovanni Modugno (2) , Laurent Sanchez-Palencia (1)

1 Laboratoire Charles Fabry / Optique atomique
2 European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy (LENS)
3 University of Auckland [Auckland]
4 INRiM - Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica
5 UNIGE - Université de Genève = University of Geneva

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.

Domains: Quantum Gases [cond-mat.quant-gas]

Guilhem Boéris, Lorenzo Gori, Marteen D. Hoogerland, Avinash Kumar, Eleonora Lucioni, et al.. Mott Transition for Strongly-Interacting 1D Bosons in a Shallow Periodic Potential. Physical Review A : Atomic, molecular, and optical physics [1990-2015], 2016, 93, 011601 (Rapid Comm.). ⟨10.1103/PhysRevA.93.011601⟩. ⟨hal-01199719v2⟩