Dynamical properties of ultracold bosons in an optical lattice

We study the excitation spectrum of strongly correlated lattice bosons for the Mott-insulating phase and for the superfluid phase close to localization. Within a Schwinger-boson mean-field approach we find two gapped modes in the Mott insulator and the combination of a sound mode (Goldstone) and a gapped (Higgs) mode in the superfluid. To make our findings comparable with experimental results, we calculate the dynamic structure factor as well as the linear response to the optical lattice modulation introduced by Stoferle [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 130403 (2004)]. We find that the puzzling finite frequency absorption observed in the superfluid phase could be explained via the excitation of the gapped (Higgs) mode. We check the consistency of our results with an adapted f-sum rule and propose an extension of the experimental technique by Stoferle to further verify our findings.