Multi-orbital and density-induced tunneling of bosons in optical lattices

We show that multi-orbital and density-induced tunneling have a significant impact on the phase diagram of bosonic atoms in optical lattices. Off-site interactions lead to density-induced hopping, the so-called bond-charge interactions, which can be identified with an effective tunneling potential and can reach the same order of magnitude as conventional tunneling. In addition, interaction-induced higher-band processes also give rise to strongly modified tunneling, on-site and bond-charge interactions. We derive an extended occupation-dependent Hubbard model with multi-orbitally renormalized processes and compute the corresponding phase diagram. It substantially deviates from the single-band Bose–Hubbard model and predicts strong changes of the superfluid-to-Mott-insulator transition. In general, the presented beyond-Hubbard physics plays an essential role in bosonic lattice systems and has an observable influence on experiments with tunable interactions.