Insulating Phases and Superfluid-Insulator Transition of Disordered Boson Chains

Abstract

Using a strong disorder real-space renormalization group, we study the phase diagram of a fully disordered chain of interacting bosons. Since this approach does not suffer from runaway flows, it allows a direct study of the insulating phases, not accessible in a weak disorder perturbative treatment. We find that the universal properties of the insulating phase are determined by the details and symmetries of the on-site chemical-potential disorder. Three insulating phases are possible: (i) an incompressible Mott glass with a finite superfluid susceptibility, (ii) a random-singlet glass with diverging compressibility and superfluid susceptibility, (iii) a Bose glass with a finite compressibility but diverging superfluid susceptibility. In addition to characterizing the insulating phases, we show that the superfluid-insulator transition is always described by Kosterlitz-Thouless-like flows.