QUROPE Quantum Information Processing and Communication in Europe

We study the extended Bose--Hubbard model describing an ultra-cold gas of dipolar molecules in an optical lattice, taking into account all on-site and nearest-neighbor interactions, including occupation-dependent tunneling and pair tunneling terms. Using exact diagonalization and the multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA), we show that these terms can destroy insulating phases and lead to novel quantum phases. These considerable changes of the phase diagram have to be taken into account in upcoming experiments with dipolar molecules.