The inhomogeneous extended Bose-Hubbard model: A mean-field theory

We develop an inhomogeneous mean-field theory for the extended Bose-Hubbard model with a quadratic, confining potential. In the absence of this potential, our mean-field theory yields the phase diagram of the homogeneous extended Bose-Hubbard model. This phase diagram shows a superfluid (SF) phase and lobes of Mott-insulator (MI), density-wave (DW), and supersolid (SS) phases in the plane of the chemical potential mu and on-site repulsion U; we present phase diagrams for representative values of V, the repulsive energy for bosons on nearest-neighbor sites. We demonstrate that, when the confining potential is present, superfluid and density-wave order parameters are nonuniform; in particular, we obtain, for a few representative values of parameters, spherical shells of SF, MI, DW, and SS phases. We explore the implications of our study for experiments on cold-atom dipolar condensates in optical lattices in a confining potential