Dynamics and evaporation of defects in Mott-insulating clusters of boson pairs

Repulsively bound pairs of particles in a lattice governed by the Bose-Hubbard model can form stable incompressible clusters of dimers corresponding to finite-size n = 2 Mott insulators. Here we study the dynamics of hole defects in such clusters corresponding to unpaired particles which can resonantly tunnel out of the cluster into the lattice vacuum. Due to bosonic statistics, the unpaired particles have different effective mass inside and outside the cluster, and evaporation of hole defects from the cluster boundaries is possible only when their quasimomenta are within a certain transmission range. We show that quasithermalization of hole defects occurs in the presence of catalyzing particle defects which thereby purify the Mott-insulating clusters. We study the dynamics of a one-dimensional system using analytical techniques and numerically exact time-dependent density-matix renormalization-group simulations. We derive an effective strong-interaction model that enables simulations of the system dynamics for much longer times. We also discuss a more general case of two bosonic species which reduces to the fermionic Hubbard model in the strong interaction limit.