Cluster Gutzwiller study of the Bose-Hubbard ladder: Ground-state phase diagram and many-body Landau-Zener dynamics

We present a cluster Gutzwiller mean-field study for ground states and time-evolution dynamics in the Bose-Hubbard ladder (BHL), which can be realized by loading Bose atoms in double-well optical lattices. In our cluster mean-field approach, we treat each double-well unit of two lattice sites as a coherent whole for composing the cluster Gutzwiller ansatz, which may remain some residual correlations in each two-site unit. For an unbiased BHL, in addition to conventional superfluid phase and integer Mott insulator phases, we find that there are exotic fractional insulator phases if the interchain tunneling is much stronger than the intrachain one. The fractional insulator phases cannot be found by using a conventional mean-field treatment based upon the single-site Gutzwiller ansatz. For a biased BHL, we find there appear single-atom tunneling and interaction blockade if the system is dominated by the interplay between the on-site interaction and the interchain bias. In the many-body Landau-Zener process, in which the interchain bias is linearly swept from negative to positive or vice versa, our numerical results are qualitatively consistent with the experimental observation [Nat. Phys. 7, 61 (2011)]. Our cluster bosonic Gutzwiller treatment is of promising perspectives in exploring exotic quantum phases and time-evolution dynamics of bosonic particles in superlattices.