The effect of strongly repulsive interactions on the tunneling amplitude of hard-sphere (HS) bosons confined in a simple cubic optical lattice plus tight external harmonic confinement in continuous space is investigated. The quantum variational Monte Carlo (VMC) and the variational path integral (VPI) Monte Carlo techniques are used at zero temperature. The effects of the lattice spacing on the tunneling amplitude are also considered. The occupancies of the lattice sites as a function of the repulsion between the bosons are further revealed. Our chief result is that for a small number of bosons ($N=8$) the overlap of the wave functions in neighboring wells practically does not change with an increase of the repulsive interactions and changes only minimally for a larger number of particles ($N=40$). The tunneling amplitude rises with a reduction in the lattice spacing. In addition, the occupancy of the center of the trap decreases in favor of a rise in the occupancy of the lattice sites at the edges of the trap with increasing HS repulsion. Further, it was found that the energy per particle at certain optical-lattice barrier heights is insensitive to the number of particles and variations in the HS diameter of the bosons. In order to support our results, we compare the VMC results with corresponding VPI results.

• Received 31 October 2009

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.81.043603