Temperature in one-dimensional bosonic Mott insulators

The Mott insulating phase of a one-dimensional bosonic gas trapped in an optical lattice is described by a Bose-Hubbard model. A continuous unitary transformation is used to map this model onto an effective model conserving the number of elementary excitations. We obtain quantitative results for the kinetics and for the spectral weights of the low-energy excitations for a broad range of parameters in the insulating phase. By these results, recent Bragg spectroscopy experiments are explained. Evidence for a significant temperature of the order of the microscopic energy scales is found.