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Density Modulations Associated with the Dynamical Instability in the Bose-Hubbard Model

A superfluid flow beyond a critical momentum in an optical lattice decays drastically by the interplay between nonlinearity due to the interparticle interactions in Bose-Einstein condensate and periodicity of the lattice; this instability is called dynamical instability. The complex density modulational profiles after the condensate becomes unstable observed experimentally is not completely understood, while the dynamical instability has been studied theoretically and experimentally. In this paper, we analyze the density modulation of condensates as a precursor of the dynamical instability in the two-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model. Our analysis has clarified the unexplored properties of the density modulations associated with the dynamical instability at low filling and in a wide range of interactions, while the previous works have analyzed the density modulation on the basis of Gross-Pitaevskii equation under the specific condition that one-dimensional optical lattice is very shallow and the filling is very large. The numerical simulations based on the dynamical Gutzwiller approximation elucidate that the principal mode of density modulation highly depends on interaction strength U and the momentum acceleration rate. We briefly discuss these features with the stability phase diagram calculated on the basis of the Bogoliubov theory.