The role of interactions, tunneling, and harmonic confinement on the adiabatic loading of bosons in an optical lattice

We calculate entropy-temperature curves for interacting bosons in unit filled optical lattices for both homogeneous and harmonically trapped situations, and use them to understand how adiabatic changes in the lattice depth affect the temperature of the system. In a translationally invariant lattice, the zero tunneling limit facilitates a rather detailed analytic description. Unlike the noninteracting bosonic system which is always cooled upon adiabatic loading for low enough initial temperature, the change in the excitation spectrum induced by interactions can lead to heating. Finite tunneling helps to reduce this heating. Finally, we study the spatially inhomogeneous system confined in a parabolic potential and show that the presence of the trap can significantly reduce the final available temperature, due to the nonvanishing superfluid component at the edge of the cloud which is present in trapped systems.