Dynamics of the mott insulator to superfluid quantum phase transition in the truncated wigner approximation

Abstract

The quantum phase transition from the Mott insulator state to the superfluid in the Bose-Hubbard model is investigated. We research one, two and three dimensional lattices in the truncated Wigner approximation. We compute both kinetic and potential energy and they turn out to have a power law behaviour as a function of the transition rate, with the power equal to 1/3. The same applies to the total energy in a system with a harmonic trap, which is usually present in the experimental set-up. These observations are in agreement with the experiment of [8], where such scalings were also observed and the power of the decay was numerically close to 1/3. The results confirm the Kibble-Zurek (adiabatic-impulse-adiabatic approximation) scenario for this transition. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.