Finite temperature phase diagram of the extended Bose-Hubbard model in the presence of disorder

Abstract

We study the finite and non-zero temperature phase diagram of the Extended Bose-Hubbard Model for both pure and disordered systems. Such a system can be experimentally realized by trapping ultracold Rydberg atoms in optical lattices. By regulating the Rydberg excitation level and the lattice spacing, the system can be engineered to effectively have (i) only the nearest-neighbor interaction and (ii) both nearest-neighbor and next-nearest-neighbor interactions. For both of these situations, we construct the mean-field phase diagrams. It is found that the presence of a non-zero temperature significantly changes the phase diagram because now there is a competition between quantum and thermal fluctuations. We observe that conventional Mott insulator (MI) or charge-density-wave (CDW) lobes vanish at higher temperatures. In a pure system, they melt into a normal fluid (NF). In contrast, the insulating phases that survive at high temperatures in the presence of disorder are the Bose glass and the normal fluid. It is evident that the CDW lobes melt at a lower temperature and the Mott lobes melt at higher temperatures. These transition temperatures depend on the on-site and nearest-neighbor interaction strengths, respectively. It is also found that, with the addition of disorder, the insulating lobes are destroyed at a relatively lower temperature. The mathematical framework that we present here is capable of treating long-range interactions, disorder, and finite temperature simultaneously, and versatile enough so that it can be extended to study different forms of disorder or longer-range interactions.