| We investigate the phase diagram and the metastable states of a gas of dipolar bosons in a 2D optical lattice as a function of the orientation of the dipoles and of the ratio between on-site and dipole-dipole interaction. We find that there exists a multitude of almost degenerate metastable states, which make dipolar bosons in a lattice similar to a disordered system. Using the time-dependent Gutzwiller ansatz, we investigate the robustness of the metastable states to tunneling and temperature. We propose this system as a quantum memory robust against imperfections and discuss possible initialisation procedures in the contest of optical and magnetic microtraps for neutral atoms. |
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