Collective modes of a strongly interacting Bose gas: Probing the Mott transition

We analyze the collective modes of a harmonically trapped, strongly interacting Bose gas in an optical lattice in the vicinity of the Mott-insulator transition. For that aim we employ the dynamical Gutzwiller mean-field method, by performing real-time evolution and by solving the equations in linear response. We find a strong dependence on the spatial dimension of the system: while in one dimension the frequency of the dipole mode vanishes at the Mott transition, in higher dimensions the dominant dipole mode is featureless and we find a signature only in the breathing mode. We discuss implications for experiments with bosonic and fermionic atoms.