No abstract

We discuss the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking and the elementary excitations for a weakly-interacting Bose gas at finite temperature. We consider both the non-relativistic case, described by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, and the relativistic one, described by the cubic nonlinear Klein-Gordon equation. We analyze similarities and differences in the two equations and, in particular, in the phase and amplitude modes (i.e. Goldstone and Higgs modes) of the bosonic matter field. We show that the coupling between phase and amplitude modes gives rise to a single gapless Bogoliubov spectrum in the non-relativistic case. Instead, in the relativistic case the spectrum has two branches: one is gapless and the other is gapped. In the non-relativistic limit we find that the relativistic spectrum reduces to the Bogoliubov one. Finally, as an application of the above analysis, we consider the Bose-Hubbard model close to the superfluid-Mott quantum phase transition and we investigate the elementary excitations of its effective action, which contains both non-relativistic and relativistic terms.PACS numbers:

Recent advances in cooling techniques make now possible the experimental study of quantum phase transitions, which are transitions near absolute zero temperature accessed by varying a control parameter. A paradigmatic example is the superfluid-Mott transition of interacting bosons on a periodic lattice. From the relativistic Ginzburg-Landau action of this superfluid-Mott transition we derive the elementary excitations of the bosonic system, which contain in the superfluid phase a gapped Higgs mode and a gappless Goldstone mode. We show that this energy spectrum is in good agreement with the available experimental data and we use it to extract, with the help of dimensional regularization, meaningful analytical formulas for the beyond-mean-field equation of state in two and three spatial dimensions. We find that, while the mean-field equation of state always gives a second-order quantum phase transition, the inclusion of Gaussian quantum fluctuations can induce a first-order quantum phase transition. This prediction is a strong benchmark for next future experiments on quantum phase transitions.arXiv:1808.09338v2 [cond-mat.quant-gas]