
3
ρ.1
Let us now give a brief overview of our results. The
phase diagram we obtain is shown in Fig. 2(a), and
contains a lot of information. At the present juncture
we will only mention its most salient features, leaving a
more detailed treatment to the following sections.
Our first result is that—at least in the thermodynamic
limit—there is a nonzero charge gap to exciting single
bosons throughout the phase diagram. Regardless of t/U
and ρ, the boson correlation functions always decay as
hb†
ibji ∼ e−|i−j|/ξ, with the ground state being incom-
pressible across the entire phase diagram. This is rather
remarkable, as the system thus remains incompressible
over a continuous range of filling fractions, and moreover
does so without disorder, and with only short-ranged in-
teractions. It manages to do this by having vortices in the
boson phase condense at all points of the phase diagram,
a situation which is made possible by the way in which
dipole conservation modifies vortex energetics. This is of
course in marked contrast to the regular Bose-Hubbard
model, which has a compressible superfluid phase which
is broken by incompressible Mott insulators only at inte-
ger filling fractions and weak hopping strengths [26].
While the statements in the above paragraph are cor-
rect in the thermodynamic limit, the ubiquitous vortex
condensation just discussed may be suppressed in finite
systems. This will happen if the operators which cre-
ate vortices can take a long time to be generated under
RG, becoming appreciable only at extremely large length
scales. In our model this is particularly relevant at frac-
tional fillings, where a BEI seems to be realized in our
DMRG numerics. In Sec. Vwe study this phenomenon
from a different point of view within the context of a
dipolar rotor model.
The broad-strokes picture of our phase diagram is dic-
tated by the physics of neutral ‘excitonic’ dipolar bound
states of particles and holes annihilated by the dipole
operators
di≡b†
ibi+1.(3)
As discussed above, the motion of these dipolar particle-
hole bound states is not constrained by dipole conserva-
tion. This can be seen mathematically by noting that
the hopping terms in HDBHM can be written using the
dioperators as
Hhop =−X
i
(t3d†
idi+1 +t4d†
idi+2 +h.c.),(4)
and thus constitute conventional hopping terms for the
dipolar bound states. Since the dipolar bound states are
allowed to move freely, it is natural to expect that the
1See also Ref. [11] for a discussion of the ground state physics of
a dipolar spin-1 model, which in some aspects behaves similarly
to our model at half-odd-integer filling and small t3,4/U.
most efficient way for the system to lower its energy is
for them to Bose condense. Indeed, this expectation is
born out in both our field theory analysis and in our
numerical simulations. The result of this condensation is
an exotic gapless phase we refer to as a dipole condensate
(DC). Unlike the superfluid that occurs in the standard
Bose-Hubbard model, the dipole condensate realized here
is formed by charge neutral objects, and in fact actually
has vanishing DC conductivity.
A second interesting feature of the DBHM is an insta-
bility to an exotic glassy phase we dub the fractured Bose
droplet (FBD) phase. This instability occurs in the green
region drawn in the phase diagram of Fig. 2(a), and is in
fact common to all dipole-conserving boson models of the
form (1). It arises simply due to the √nfactors appearing
in b|ni=√n|n−1i, b†|n−1i=√n|ni. These factors
mean that when acting on a state of average density ρ,
the dipolar hopping terms in the Hamiltonian scale as
−2(t3+t4)ρ2at large ρ, precisely in the same way as the
Hubbard repulsion term, which goes as + 1
2Uρ2. Thus
when
t3+t4≥U
4,(5)
it is always energetically favorable to locally make ρas
large as possible (in our phase diagram, DMRG finds an
instability exactly when this condition is satisfied). Once
this occurs, the lowest-energy state of the system will
be one in which all of the bosons agglomerate into one
macroscopic droplet [Fig. 2(b), panel 4].
The physics of the FBD phase is actually much more
interesting than the above discussion might suggest:
rather than simply forming a giant droplet containing an
extensively large number of bosons, dipole conservation
means that the system instead fractures into an interest-
ing type of metastable glassy state (the physics of which
may underlie the observation of spontaneous formation
in the dipole-conserving 2d system of Ref. [27]). Un-
derstanding the physics of this phase requires a set of
theoretical tools better adapted to addressing dynamical
questions, and will be addressed in a separate upcoming
work [28] (see also the fractonic microemulsions of Ref.
[23]).
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In
the next section (Sec. II), we briefly discuss various possi-
ble routes to realizing the DBHM in experiment, focusing
in particular on the setup of tilted optical lattices. In Sec.
III we develop a general field theory approach that we use
to understand the phase diagram in broad strokes. This
approach in particular allows us to understand the role
that vortices in the boson phase play in determining the
nature of the phase diagram. In Sec. IV we discuss a few
characteristic features possessed by the dipole conden-
sate, as well as how to detect its existence in experiment.
In Sec. V, we give a more detailed discussion of how the
exotic physics of the Bose-Einstein insulator may appear
in small systems due to finite-size effects. The following
sections VI,VII, and VIII discuss in detail the physics