Quantum phases of dipolar bosons in a multilayer optical lattice

Abstract

We consider a minimal model to investigate the quantum phases of hardcore, polarized dipolar atoms confined in multilayer optical lattices. The model is a variant of the extended Bose-Hubbard model, which incorporates intralayer repulsion and interlayer attraction between the atoms in nearest-neighbor sites. We study the phases of this model emerging from the competition between the attractive interlayer interaction and the interlayer hopping. Our results from the analytical and cluster-Gutzwiller mean-field theories reveal that multimer formation occurs in the regime of weak intra- and interlayer hopping due to the attractive interaction. In addition, intralayer isotropic repulsive interaction results in the checkerboard ordering of the multimers. This leads to an incompressible checkerboard multimer phase at half-filling. At higher interlayer hopping, the multimers are destabilized to form resonating valence-bond-like states. Furthermore, we discuss the effects of thermal fluctuations on the quantum phases of the system.