Unconventional quantum phases of lattice bosonic mixtures
P. Buonsante, S. M. Giampaolo, F. Illuminati, V. Penna, A. Vezzani
备注：
10 pages, 2 figures - to appear in the topical issue on "Novel Quantum Phases and Mesoscopic Physics in Quantum Gases" of the European Physical Journal B (2009)
We consider strongly interacting boson-boson mixtures on one-dimensional lattices and, by adopting a qualitative mean-field approach, investigate their quantum phases as the interspecies repulsion is increased. In particular, we analyze the low-energy "quantum emulsion" metastable states occurring at large values of the interspecies interaction, which are expected to prevent the system from reaching its true ground state. We argue a significant decrease in the visibility of the time-of-flight images in the case of these spontaneously disordered states.
Mixtures of cold bosonic atoms in optical lattices undergo phase separations on different length scales with increasing inter-species repulsion. As a general rule, the stronger the intra-species interactions, the shorter is this length scale. The wealth of phenomena is documented by illustrative examples on both superfluids and Mott-insulators.
We investigate the properties of trapped Bose-Fermi mixtures for experimentally relevant parameters in one dimension. The effect of the attractive Bose-Fermi interaction onto the bosons is to deepen the parabolic trapping potential, and to reduce the bosonic repulsion in higher order, leading to an increase in bosonic coherence. The opposite effect was observed in ${}^{87}$Rb - ${}^{40}$K experiments, most likely due to a sharp rise in temperature. We also discuss low-temperature features, such as a bosonic Mott insulator transition driven by the fermion concentration, and the formation of com…
Motivated by recent experiments on two-component systems, we investigate the ground-state phase diagram of a mixture of two bosonic species by means of path-integral quantum Monte Carlo by the two-worm algorithm. The mixture is trapped in a square lattice at half-filling conditions. Various quantum phases are stabilized depending on the interplay between intra- and inter-species interactions. We show that the phase diagram features a demixed superfluid phase and demixed Mott-Insulator phase when the inter-species interaction becomes greater than the intra-species repulsion, and a double-superf…
We introduce an inhomogeneous bosonic mixture composed of two kinds of hard-core and semi-hard-core bosons with different nilpotency conditions and demonstrate that in contrast with the standard hard-core Bose-Hubbard model, our bosonic mixture with nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor interactions on a square lattice develops the checkerboard supersolid phase characterized by the simultaneous superfluid and checkerboard solid orders. Our bosonic mixture is created from a two-orbital Bose-Hubbard model including two kinds of bosons: a single-orbital boson and a two-orbital boson. By mapping the …
Motivated by recent experiments and theoretical investigations on binary mixtures, we investigate the miscible-immiscible transition at finite temperature by means of Quantum Monte Carlo. Based on the observation that the segregated phase is strongly affected by temperature, we propose to use the degree of demixing for thermometry of a binary bosonic mixture trapped in an optical lattice. We show that the proposed method is especially sensitive at low temperatures, of the order of the tunnelling amplitude, and therefore is particularly suitable in the regime where quantum magnetism is expected…
We study fermionic superfluidity in a boson-single-species-fermion cold atom mixture. We argue that apart from the standard p-wave fermion pairing mediated by the phonon field of the boson gas, the system also exhibits s-wave pairing with the anomalous correlator being an odd function of time or frequency. We show that such a superfluid phase can have a much higher transition temperature than the p-wave and may exist for sufficiently strong couplings between fermions and bosons. These conditions for odd-frequency pairing are favorable close to the value of the coupling at which the mixture pha…
Feschbach resonances in a non-s-wave channel of two-component bosonic mixtures can induce atomic Bose Einstein condensates with a non-zero orbital momentum in the optical lattice, if one component is in the Mott insulator state and the other is not. Such non-s-wave condensates break the symmetry of the lattice and, in some cases, time-reversal symmetry. They can be revealed in specific absorption imaging patterns.
We perform a numeric study (worm algorithm Monte Carlo simulations) of ultracold two-component bosons in two- and three-dimensional optical lattices. At strong enough interactions and low enough temperatures the system features magnetic ordering. We compute critical temperatures and entropies for the disappearance of the Ising antiferromagnetic and the xy-ferromagnetic order and find that the largest possible entropies per particle are ~0.5kB. We also estimate (optimistically) the experimental hold times required to reach equilibrium magnetic states to be on a scale of seconds. Low critical en…
We study the transition to fermion pair superfluidity in a mixture of interacting bosonic and fermionic atoms. The fermion interaction induced by the bosons and the dynamical screening of the condensate phonons due to fermions are included using the nonperturbative Hamiltonian flow equations. We determine the bosonic spectrum near the transition towards phase separation and find that the superfluid transition temperature may be increased substantially due to phonon damping.
We consider the formation of bright solitons in a mixture of Bose and Fermi degenerate gases confined in a three-dimensional elongated harmonic trap. The Bose and Fermi atoms are assumed to effectively attract each other whereas bosonic atoms repel each other. Strong enough attraction between bosonic and fermionic components can change the character of the interaction within the bosonic cloud from repulsive to attractive making thus possible the generation of bright solitons in the mixture. On the other hand, such structures might be in danger due to the collapse phenomenon existing in attract…
We consider a strongly interacting one-dimensional (1D) Bose-Fermi mixture confined in a harmonic trap. It consists of a Tonks-Girardeau (TG) gas (1D Bose gas with repulsive hard-core interactions) and of a non-interacting Fermi gas (1D spin-aligned Fermi gas), both species interacting through hard-core repulsive interactions. Using a generalized Bose-Fermi mapping, we determine the exact particle density profiles, momentum distributions and behaviour of the mixture under 1D expansion when opening the trap. In real space, bosons and fermions do not display any phase separation: the respective …
We determine the phase diagram of a mixture of ultracold bosons and polarized fermions placed in an optical lattice using mean field theory. In the limit of strong atom-atom interactions, there exist quantum phases that involve pairing of fermions with one or more bosons, or bosonic holes, respectively. We obtain the analytic form of the phase boundaries separating these composite fermion phases from the bosonic superfluid coexisting with Fermi liquid. We compare the results with numerical simulations and discuss their validity and relevance for current experiments.
We consider a mixture of hard core bosonic polar molecules, interacting via repulsive dipole-dipole interaction, and one atomic bosonic species. The mixture is confined on a two-dimensional square lattice and, at low enough temperatures, can be described by the two-component Bose-Hubbard model. The latter displays a extremely rich phase diagram including solid, superfluid, supersolid phases. Here we mainly focus on the checkerboard molecular solid, stabilized by the long range dipolar interaction, and study how the presence of atoms affects its robustness both at zero and finite temperature. W…
We control the interspecies interaction in a two-species atomic quantum mixture by tuning the magnetic field at a Feshbach resonance. The mixture is composed by fermionic 40K and bosonic 87Rb. We observe effects of the large attractive and repulsive interaction energy across the resonance, such as collapse or a reduced spatial overlap of the mixture, and we accurately locate the resonance position and width. Understanding and controlling instabilities in this mixture opens the way to a variety of applications, including formation of heteronuclear molecular quantum gases.
The study of ultracold optically trapped atoms has opened new vistas in the physics of correlated quantum systems. Much attention has now turned to mixtures of bosonic and fermionic atoms. A central puzzle is the disagreement between the experimental observation of a reduced bosonic visibility ${\cal V}_b$, and quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) calculations which show ${\cal V}_b$ increasing. In this paper, we present QMC simulations which evaluate the density profiles and ${\cal V}_b$ of mixtures of bosons and fermions in one-dimensional optical lattices. We resolve the discrepancy between theory and…
We study bosonic atoms in small optical lattices by exact diagonalization and observe a striking similarity to the superfluid to Mott insulator transition in macroscopic systems. The momentum distribution, the formation of an energy gap, and the pair correlation function show only a weak size dependence. For noncommensurate filling we reveal in deep lattices a mixture of localized and delocalized particles, which is sensitive to lattice imperfections. Breaking the lattice symmetry causes a Bose-glass-like behavior. We discuss the nature of excited states and orbital effects by using an exact d…
We consider a mixture of single-component bosonic and fermionic atoms in an array of coupled one-dimensional "tubes". For an attractive Bose-Fermi interaction, we show that the system exhibits phase separation instead of the usual collapse. Moreover, above a critical inter-tube hopping, all first-order instabilities disappear in both attractive and repulsive mixtures. The possibility of suppressing instabilities in this system suggests a route towards the realization of paired phases, including a superfluid of p-wave pairs unique to the coupled-tube system, and quantum critical phenomena.
We study a dilute mixture of degenerate bosons and fermions across a Feshbach resonance of the Fermi-Fermi scattering length $a_F$. This scattering length is renormalized by the boson-induced interaction between fermions and its value is crucial to determine the phase diagram of the system. For the mixture in a box and a positive Bose-Fermi scattering length, we show that there are three possibilities: a single uniform mixed phase, a purely fermionic phase coexisting with a mixed phase, and a purely fermionic phase coexisting with a purely bosonic one. As $1/a_F$ is increased from a negative v…
We describe interacting mixtures of ultracold bosonic and fermionic atoms in harmonically confined optical lattices. For a suitable choice of parameters we study the emergence of superfluid and Fermi liquid (non-insulating) regions out of Bose-Mott and Fermi-band insulators, due to finite Boson and Fermion hopping. We obtain the shell structure for the system and show that angular momentum can be transferred to the non-insulating regions from Laguerre-Gaussian beams, which combined with Bragg spectroscopy can reveal all superfluid and Fermi liquid shells.
By minimizing the coupled mean-field energy functionals, we investigate the ground-state properties of a rotating atomic boson-fermion mixture in a two-dimensional parabolic trap. At high angular frequencies in the mean-field-lowest-Landau-level regime, quantized vortices enter the bosonic condensate, and a finite number of degenerate fermions form the maximum-density-droplet state. As the boson-fermion coupling constant increases, the maximum density droplet develops into a lower-density state associated with the phase separation, revealing characteristics of a Landau-level structure.
