Contour-time approach to the disordered Bose-Hubbard model in the strong coupling regime

Abstract

There has been considerable interest in the disordered Bose Hubbard model (BHM) in recent years, particularly in the context of thermalization and many-body localization. We develop a two-particle irreducible (2PI) strong-coupling approach to the disordered BHM that allows us to treat both equilibrium and out-of-equilibrium situations. We obtain equations of motion for spatio-temporal correlations and explore their equilibrium solutions. We study the equilibrium phase diagram as a function of disorder strength and discuss applications of the formalism to out-of-equilibrium situations. We also note that the disorder strengths where the emergence of non-ergodic dynamics was observed in a recent experiment [Choi et al. (2016) [61]] appear to correspond to the Mott insulator – Bose Glass phase boundary.