Using off-diagonal confinement as a cooling method

In a recent letter [Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 167201 (2010)] we proposed a new confining method for ultracold atoms on optical lattices, which is based on off-diagonal confinement (ODC). This method was shown to have distinct advantages over the conventional diagonal confinement (DC), which makes use of a trapping potential, such as the existence of pure Mott phases and highly populated condensates. In this manuscript we show that the ODC method can also lead to lower temperatures than the DC method for a wide range of control parameters. Using exact diagonalization we determine this range of parameters for the hard-core case and then we extend our results to the soft-core case by performing quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations for both DC and ODC systems at fixed temperature and analyzing the corresponding entropies. We also propose a method for measuring the entropy in QMC simulations.