Competition between pair and single-particle superfluidity in bosonic quasi-flat bands: A Gaussian state approach

The interplay between interactions and quantum geometry can drive weakly dispersive bosons into different exotic many-body phases. In this work we study a quasi flat-band model in one dimension that exhibits an extended pair-superfluid phase in the all-flat-band limit. Introducing single-particle hopping leads to an intriguing competition with a more conventional single-particle superfluid: we find that the pair superfluid remains stable for a finite range of the hopping strength until the system eventually transitions into the conventional superfluid phase. In our study, we make use of a variational Gaussian state approach that provides a unified description of the single-particle and pair superfluid phases, regarding both the ground state wavefunction and the collective excitation spectrum. In particular, we derive a general relation between the speed of sound and a ``quantum geometric kernel'', thereby extending earlier connections to the quantum metric, which relied on single-particle mean-field theory. This approach is combined with insights from the two-boson problem and exact diagonalization to map out the full phase diagram of the model. Our results show that the Gaussian approach is a versatile tool for studying a broad range of superfluid phases of interacting bosons in multi-orbital lattices.