Effect of anisotropic hopping on the Bose Hubbard model phase diagram: strong-coupling perturbation theory on a square lattice

There has been a recent resurgence of experimental efforts to quantitatively determine the phase diagram of the Bose Hubbard model by carefully analyzing experiments with ultracold bosonic atoms on an optical lattice. In many realizations of these experiments, the hopping amplitudes are not homogeneous throughout the lattice, but instead, the lattice has an anisotropy where hopping along one direction is not exactly equal to hopping along a perpendicular direction. In this contribution, we examine how an anisotropy in the hopping matrix elements affects the Mott lobes of the Bose Hubbard model. For weak anisotropy, we find the phase diagram is only slightly modified when expressed in terms of the average hopping, while for strong anisotropy, one expects to ultimately see dimensional crossover effects.