  The Mott insulating phase of a one-dimensional bosonic gas trapped in optical
lattices is described by a Bose-Hubbard model. A continuous unitary
transformation is used to map this model onto an effective model conserving the
number of elementary excitations. We obtain quantitative results for the
kinetics and for the spectral weights of the low-energy excitations for a broad
range of parameters in the insulating phase. By these results, recent Bragg
spectroscopy experiments are explained. Evidence for a significant temperature
of the order of the microscopic energy scales is found.
