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Rousseau, V G

Publications and source records attributed to Rousseau, V G.

Ground-state phase diagram of spin-(1/2) bosons in a two-dimensional optical lattice

We study a two-species bosonic Hubbard model on a two-dimensional square lattice by means of quantum Monte Carlo simulations. In addition to the usual contact repulsive interactions between the particles, the Hamiltonian has an interconversion term which allows the transformation of two particles from one species to the other. The phases are characterized by their solid or superfluid properties and by their polarization, i.e., the difference in the populations. When interspecies interactions are smaller than the intraspecies ones, the system is unpolarized, whereas in the opposite case the system is unpolarized in even Mott insulator lobes and polarized in odd Mott lobes and also in the superfluid phase. We show that in the latter case the transition between the Mott insulator of total density 2 and the superfluid can be of either second or first order depending on the relative values of the interactions, whereas the transitions are continuous in all other cases.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Phase diagram of spin-(1/2) bosons in a one-dimensional optical lattice

Systems of two coupled bosonic species are studied using mean field theory and the quantum Monte Carlo method. The phase diagram is characterized on the basis of both the mobility of the particles (Mott insulating or superfluid) and whether or not the system is magnetic (different populations for the two species). The phase diagram is shown to be population balanced for negative spin-dependent interactions, regardless of whether it is insulating or superfluid. For positive spin-dependent interactions, the superfluid phase is always polarized, and the two populations are imbalanced. However, the Mott-insulating phase with even commensurate filling always has balanced populations. In contrast, the Mott phase with odd commensurate filling has balanced populations in a very strong interaction and polarizes as the interaction gets weaker while still in the Mott phase.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Using off-diagonal confinement as a cooling method

In a recent letter [Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 167201 (2010)] we proposed a new confining method for ultracold atoms on optical lattices, which is based on off-diagonal confinement (ODC). This method was shown to have distinct advantages over the conventional diagonal confinement (DC), which makes use of a trapping potential, such as the existence of pure Mott phases and highly populated condensates. In this manuscript we show that the ODC method can also lead to lower temperatures than the DC method for a wide range of control parameters. Using exact diagonalization we determine this range of parameters for the hard-core case and then we extend our results to the soft-core case by performing quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations for both DC and ODC systems at fixed temperature and analyzing the corresponding entropies. We also propose a method for measuring the entropy in QMC simulations.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗