Insulator-Superfluid transition of spin-1 bosons in an optical lattice in magnetic field

A. A. Svidzinsky, S. T. Chui

Published 2003-05-21Version 1

We study the insulator-superfluid transition of spin-1 bosons in an optical lattice in a uniform magnetic field. Based on a mean-field approximation we obtained a zero-temperature phase diagram. We found that depending on the particle number the transition for bosons with antiferromagnetic interaction may occur into different superfluid phases with spins aligned along or opposite to the field direction. This is qualitatively different from the field-free transition for which the mean-field theory predicts a unique (polar) superfluid state for any particle number.