Mott phases and superfluid-insulator transition of dipolar spin-three bosons in an optical lattice: implications for Cr atoms

Abstract

We study the Mott phases and superfluid-insulator transition of spin-three bosons in an optical lattice with an anisotropic two dimensional optical trap. We chart out the phase diagrams for Mott states with $n=1$ and $n=2$ atoms per lattice site. It is shown that the long-range dipolar interaction stabilizes a state where the chains of the ferromagnetically aligned spins run along the longer trap direction while the spin ordering is staggered between nearby chains, leading to an antiferromagnetic ordering along the shorter trap direction. We also obtain the mean-field phase boundary for the superfluid-insulator transition in these systems and study the nature of spin ordering in the superfluid state near the transition. We show that, inside the superfluid phase and near the superfluid-insulator phase boundary, the system undergoes a first order antiferromagnetic-ferromagnetic spin ordering transition. We discuss implications of our results for $^{52}$Cr atoms and suggest possible experiments to detect different phases in such systems.