Mott-Insulator Transition in a Two-Dimensional Atomic Bose Gas
Mott-Insulator Transition in a Two-Dimensional Atomic Bose Gas
Cold atoms in periodic potentials are versatile quantum systems for implementing simple models prevalent in condensed matter theory. Here we realize the 2D Bose-Hubbard model by loading a Bose-Einstein condensate into an optical lattice, and study the resulting Mott insulator. The measured momentum distributions agree quantitatively with theory (no adjustable …