Many-site coherence revivals in the extended Bose-Hubbard model and the Gutzwiller approximation

We investigate the collapse and revival of first-order coherence in deep optical lattices when long-range interactions are turned on, and find that the first few revival peaks are strongly attenuated already for moderate values of the nearest-neighbor interaction coupling. It is shown that the conventionally employed Gutzwiller wavefunction, with only onsite-number dependence of the variational amplitudes, leads to incorrect predictions for the collapse and revival oscillations. We provide a modified variant of the Gutzwiller ansatz, reproducing the analytically calculated time dependence of first-order coherence in the limit of zero tunneling.