Motivated by the recent advancements in experimental techniques in the cold atomic systems, we study the dependence of the conductivity on momentum in a system of strongly interacting bosons in an optical lattice. By employing the quantum rotor approach to the Bose-Hubbard model we calculate the current-current correlation function and subsequently obtain the analytic formula for the momentum-dependent longitudinal conductivity. We analyze the behavior of the conductivity for the square and cubic lattices in both, the superfluid and Mott insulator phases. As a consequence of the particle-hole symmetry, the conductivity for a uniformly filled lattice in the superfluid phase exhibits a linear dependence for a surprisingly wide range of momenta around $\mathbf{k}=0$. This allows us to predict the value of the group velocity of the particle excitations. We also consider the impact of finite temperature and discover that it leads to an additional conductivity channel, which is aligned along the direction of the probe field and located within the energy gap.

• Received 18 June 2021
• Revised 13 September 2021
• Accepted 14 September 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.104.104511