The Bose-Hubbard ground state: extended Bogoliubov and variational methods compared with time-evolving block decimation

We determine the ground-state properties of a gas of interacting bosonic atoms in a one-dimensional optical lattice. The system is modelled by the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian. We show how to apply the time-evolving block decimation method to systems with periodic boundary conditions, and employ it as a reference to find the ground state of the Bose-Hubbard model. Results are compared with recently proposed approximate methods, such as Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) theories generalised for strong interactions and the variational Bijl-Dingle-Jastrow method. We find that all HFB methods do not bring any improvement to the Bogoliubov theory and therefore provide correct results only in the weakly-interacting limit, where the system is deeply in the superfluid regime. On the other hand, the variational Bijl-Dingle-Jastrow method is applicable for much stronger interactions, but is essentially limited to the superfluid regime as it reproduces the superfluid-Mott insulator transition only qualitatively.