We propose a novel scheme for confining atoms to optical lattices by engineering a spatially-inhomogeneous hopping matrix element in the Hubbard-model (HM) description, a situation we term off-diagonal confinement (ODC). We show, via an exact numerical solution of the boson HM with ODC, that this scheme possesses distinct advantages over the conventional method of confining atoms using an additional trapping potential, including the presence of incompressible Mott phases at commensurate filling and a phase diagram that is similar to the uniform HM. The experimental implementation of ODC will thus allow a more faithful realization of correlated phases of interest in cold atom experiments.
We present a direct measurement of the density profile of a two-dimensional Mott Insulator formed by ultracold atoms in an optical lattice. High resolution absorption imaging is used to probe the "wedding-cake" structure of a trapped gas as it crosses the boundary from a unit-filled Mott insulating phase to the superfluid phase at finite temperature. Detailed analysis of images yields measurements of temperature and local compressibility; for the latter we observe a strong suppression deep in the Mott-insulating phase, which is recovered for the superfluid and normal phases. Furthermore, we me…
We characterize the Mott insulating regime of a repulsively interacting Fermi gas of ultracold atoms in a three-dimensional optical lattice. We use in-situ imaging to extract the central density of the gas, and to determine its local compressibility. For intermediate to strong interactions, we observe the emergence of a plateau in the density as a function of atom number, and a reduction of the compressibility at a density of one atom per site, indicating the formation of a Mott insulator. Comparisons to state-of-the-art numerical simulations of the Hubbard model over a wide range of interacti…
Mott insulating ultracold gases posses a unique whole-atom exchange interaction which enables large quantum fluctuations between the Zeeman sublevels of each atom. By strengthening this interaction---either through the use of large-spin atoms, or by tuning the particle-particle interactions via optical Feshbach resonance---one may enhance fluctuations and facilitate the appearance of the long sought-after quantum spin liquid phase---all in the highly tunable environment of cold atoms. To illustrate the relationship between the spin magnitude, interaction strength, and resulting magnetic phases…
We perform precision measurements on a Mott-insulator quantum state of ultracold atoms with tunable interactions. We probe the dependence of the superfluid-to-Mott-insulator transition on the interaction strength and explore the limits of the standard Bose-Hubbard model description. By tuning the on-site interaction energies to values comparable to the interband separation, we are able to quantitatively measure number-dependent shifts in the excitation spectrum caused by effective multi-body interactions.
We investigate harmonically-trapped, laser-pumped bosons with infinite-range interactions induced by a dissipative high-finesse red-detuned optical cavity with numerical and analytical methods. We obtain multiple cavity and atomic observables as well as the full phase diagram of the system using the multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree method for indistinguishable particles (MCTDH-X) approach. Besides the transition from an unorganized normal phase to a superradiant phase where atoms self-organize, we focus on an in-depth investigation of the self-organized superfluid to self-organized …
Interesting spin Hamiltonians can be realized with ultracold atoms in a two-component Mott insulator (2CMI). It was recently demonstrated that the application of a magnetic field gradient to the 2CMI enables new techniques of thermometry and adiabatic cooling. Here we present a theoretical description which provides quantitative analysis of these two new techniques. We show that adiabatic reduction of the field gradient is capable of cooling below the Curie or Néel temperature of certain spin ordered phases.
We present exactly solvable examples that topological Mott insulators can emerge from topologically trivial states due to strong interactions between atoms for atomic mixtures trapped in one-dimensional optical superlattice systems. The topological Mott insulating state is characterized by nonzero Chern number and appears in the strongly interacting limit as long as the total band filling factor is an integer, which is not sensitive to the filling of each component. The topological nature of the Mott phase can be revealed by observing the density profile of the trapped system. Our results can …
Ternary flavor mixtures of ultracold fermionic atoms in an optical lattice are studied in the case of equal, repulsive on-site interactions U>0. The corresponding SU(3) invariant Hubbard model is solved numerically exactly within dynamical mean-field theory using multigrid Hirsch-Fye quantum Monte Carlo simulations. We establish Mott transitions close to integer filling at low temperatures and show that the associated signatures in the compressibility and pair occupancy persist to high temperatures, i.e., should be accessible to experiments. In addition, we present spectral functions and discu…
Considering a system of ultracold atoms in an optical lattice, we propose a simple and robust implementation of a quantum simulator for the homogeneous t-J model with a well-controlled fraction of holes x. The proposed experiment can provide valuable insight into the physics of cuprate superconductors. A similar scheme applied to bosons, moreover, allows one to investigate experimentally the subtle role of inhomogeneity when a system passes from one quantum phase to another.
We study the Mott phases and the superfluid-insulator transition of two-component ultracold bosons on a square optical lattice in the presence of a non-Abelian synthetic gauge field, which renders a SU(2) hopping matrix for the bosons. Using a resummed hopping expansion, we calculate the excitation spectra in the Mott insulating phases and demonstrate that the superfluid-insulator phase boundary displays a non-monotonic dependence on the gauge field strength. We also compute the momentum distribution of the bosons in the presence of the non-Abelian field and show that they develop peaks at non…
Ultracold mixtures of different atomic species have great promise for realizing novel many-body phenomena. In a binary mixture of femions with a large mass difference and repulsive interspecies interactions, a disordered Mott insulator phase can occur. This phase displays an incompressible total density, although the relative density remain compressible. We use strong-coupling and Monte Carlo calculations to show that this phase exists for a broad parameter region for ultracold gases confined in a harmonic trap on a three-dimensional optical lattice, for experimentally accessible values of the…
We present a joint experimental and theoretical analysis to assess the adiabatic experimental preparation of ultracold bosons in optical lattices aimed at simulating the three-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model. Thermometry of lattice gases is realized from the superfluid to the Mott regime by combining the measurement of three-dimensional momentum-space densities with ab-initio quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) calculations of the same quantity. The measured temperatures across the superfluid-to-Mott transition are in agreement with isentropic lines reconstructed via QMC for the experimental parameters o…
In this work, we use inelastic scattering of light to study the response of inhomogeneous Mott-insulator gases to external excitations. The experimental setup and procedure to probe the atomic Mott states are presented in detail. We discuss the link between the energy absorbed by the gases and accessible experimental parameters as well as the linearity of the response to the scattering of light. We investigate the excitations of the system in multiple energy bands and a band-mapping technique allows us to identify band and momentum of the excited atoms. In addition the momentum distribution in…
Phase transitions and their associated crossovers are imprinted in the behavior of fluctuations. Motivated by recent experiments on ultracold atoms in optical lattices, we compute the thermodynamic density fluctuations $δN^2$ of the two-dimensional fermionic Hubbard model with plaquette cellular dynamical mean-field theory. To understand the length scale of these fluctuations, we separate the local from the nonlocal contributions to $δN^2$. We determine the effects of particle statistics, interaction strength $U$, temperature $T$ and density $n$. At high temperature, our theoretical framework …
We analyze various quantum phases of ultracold bosonic atoms in a periodic one dimensional optical superlattice. Our studies have been performed using the finite size density matrix renormalization group (FS-DMRG) method in the framework of the Bose-Hubbard model. Calculations have been carried out for a wide range of densities and the energy shifts due to the superlattice potential. At commensurate fillings, we find the Mott insulator and the superfluid phases as well as Mott insulators induced by the superlattice. At a particular incommensurate density, the system is found to be in the super…
The Higgs amplitude mode of the order parameter of an ultracold confined Fermi gas in the BCS regime after a quench of the coupling constant is analyzed theoretically. Characteristic features are a damped oscillation which at a certain transition time changes into a rather irregular dynamics. We compare the numerical solution of the full set of nonlinear equations of motion for the normal and anomalous Bogoliubov quasiparticle excitations with a linearized approximation. In doing so the transition time as well as the difference between resonant systems, i.e., systems where the Fermi energy is …
We study a class of SU(N) Heisenberg models, describing Mott insulators of fermionic ultra-cold alkaline earth atoms on the three-dimensional simple cubic lattice. Based on an earlier semiclassical analysis, magnetic order is unlikely, and we focus instead on a solvable large-N limit designed to address the competition among non-magnetic ground states. We find a rich phase diagram as a function of the filling parameter k, composed of a variety of ground states spontaneously breaking lattice symmetries, and in some cases also time reversal symmetry. One particularly striking example is a state …
We study the quasiadiabatic dynamics of a one-dimensional system of ultracold bosonic atoms loaded in an optical superlattice. Focusing on a slow linear variation in time of the superlattice potential, the system is driven from a conventional Mott insulator phase to a superlattice-induced Mott insulator, crossing in between a gapless critical superfluid region. Due to the presence of a gapless region, a number of defects depending on the velocity of the quench appear. Our findings suggest a power-law dependence similar to the Kibble-Zurek mechanism for intermediate values of the quench rate. F…
Strongly correlated materials are expected to feature unconventional transport properties, such that charge, spin, and heat conduction are potentially independent probes of the dynamics. In contrast to charge transport, the measurement of spin transport in such materials is highly challenging. We observed spin conduction and diffusion in a system of ultracold fermionic atoms that realizes the half-filled Fermi-Hubbard model. For strong interactions, spin diffusion is driven by super-exchange and doublon-hole-assisted tunneling, and strongly violates the quantum limit of charge diffusion. The t…
We study the non-equilibrium dynamics of ultracold bosons in an optical lattice with a time dependent hopping amplitude J(t)=J_0 +δJ \cos(ωt) which takes the system from a superfluid phase near the Mott-superfluid transition (J= J_0+δJ) to a Mott phase (J=J_0-δJ) and back through a quantum critical point (J=J_c) and demonstrate dynamic freezing of the boson wavefunction at specific values of ω. At these values, the wavefunction overlap F (defect density P=1-F) approaches unity (zero). We provide a qualitative explanation of the freezing phenomenon, show it's robustness against quantum fluctuat…
We present a numerical study of a confined ultracold Fermi gas showing that the Goldstone mode of the BCS gap is directly visible in the dynamics of the single-particle excitations. To this end, we investigate the low-energy dynamic response of a confined Fermi gas to a rapid change of the scattering length (i.e., an interaction quench). Based on a fully microscopic time-dependent density-matrix approach within the Bogoliubov-de Gennes formalism that includes a 3D harmonic confinement we simulate and identify the emergence of the Goldstone mode in a cigar-shaped $^6$Li gas. We show that the qu…
We study Mott insulators of fermionic alkaline earth atoms, described by Heisenberg spin models with enhanced SU(N) symmetry. In dramatic contrast to SU(2) magnetism, more than two spins are required to form a singlet. On the square lattice, the classical ground state is highly degenerate and magnetic order is thus unlikely. In a large-N limit, we find a chiral spin liquid ground state with topological order and Abelian fractional statistics. We discuss its experimental detection. Chiral spin liquids with non-Abelian anyons may also be realizable with alkaline earth atoms.
We discuss the finite-temperature phase diagram in the three-dimensional Bose-Hubbard (BH) model in the strong correlation regime, relevant for Bose-Einstein condensates in optical lattices, by employing a quantum rotor approach. In systems with strong on site repulsive interactions, the rotor U(1) phase variable dual to the local boson density emerges as an important collective field. After establishing the connection between the rotor construction and the the on--site interaction in the BH model the robust effective action formalism is developed which allows us to study the superfluid phase …
It is argued that ultracold quantum degenerate gas of ytterbium $^{173}$Yb atoms having nuclear spin $I = 5/2$ exhibits an enlarged SU$(6)$ symmetry. Within the Landau Fermi liquid theory, stability criteria against Fermi liquid (Pomeranchuk) instabilities in the spin channel are considered. Focusing on the SU$(n > 2)$ generalizations of ferromagnetism, it is shown within mean-field theory that the transition from the paramagnet to the itinerant ferromagnet is generically first order. On symmetry grounds, general SU$(n)$ itinerant ferromagnetic ground states and their topological excitations a…
We study the transmission spectra of a Bose Einstein condensate confined in an optical lattice interacting with two modes of a cavity via nonlinear two-photon transition. In particular we show that a nonlinear two-photon interaction between the superfluid (SF) phase and the Mott insulating (MI) phase of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) and the cavity field show qualitatively different transmission spectra compared to the one-photon interaction. We found that when the BEC is in the Mott state, the usual normal mode splitting present in the one-photon transition is missing in the two-photon inte…
We present accurate results based on Quantum Monte Carlo simulations of two-component bosonic systems on a square lattice and in the presence of an external harmonic confinement. Starting from hopping parameters and interaction strengths which stabilize the Ising antiferromagnetic phase in the homogeneous case and at half integer filling factor, we study how the presence of the harmonic confinement challenge the realization of such phase. We consider realistic trapping frequencies and number of particles, and establish under which conditions, i.e. total number of particles and population imbal…
Dynamical localization of interacting ultracold atoms in one-dimensional quasi-periodic potentials
Instituto de Física de São Carlos, Universidade de São Paulo（圣卡洛斯物理研究所，圣保罗大学）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, Texas A&M University（德州农工大学生物医学工程系）；Department of Physics, Presidency University（总统大学物理系）
The realization of a Mott insulating state in a system of ultracold fermions comprising far more internal components than the electron, provides an avenue for probing many-body physics that is difficult to access in solids.
We study small systems of Mott insulating ultracold atoms under the influence of gauge potentials and spin-orbit couplings. We use second order perturbation theory in tunneling, derive an effective theory for the Mott insulators with one atom per site, and solve it exactly. We find dramatic changes in the level structure and in the amount of degeneracies expected. We also demonstrate the dynamical behavior as the barriers between plaquettes are gradually removed and find potentially high overlap with the resonating valence bond (RVB) state of the larger system.
We discuss quantum fluctuations of the interface between a superfluid and a Mott-insulating state of ultracold atoms in a trap. The fluctuations of the boundary are due to a new type of surface modes, whose spectrum is similar (but not identical) to classical capillary waves. The corresponding quantum capillary length sets the scale for the penetration of the superfluid into the Mott-insulating regime by the proximity effect and may be on the order of several lattice spacings. It determines the typical magnitude of the interface width due to quantum fluctuations, which may be inferred from sin…
We study the particle-hole symmetry in the Hubbard model using ultracold fermionic atoms in an optical lattice. We demonstrate the mapping between charge and spin degrees of freedom and, in particular, show the occurrence of a state with "incompressible" magnetisation for attractive interactions. Our results present a novel approach to quantum simulation by giving access to strongly-correlated phases of matter through an experimental mapping to easier detectable observables.
We study topological properties of the Bose-Hubbard model with repulsive interactions in a one-dimensional optical superlattice. We find that the Mott insulator states of the single-component (two-component) Bose-Hubbard model under fractional fillings are topological insulators characterized by a nonzero charge (or spin) Chern number with nontrivial edge states. For ultracold atomic experiments, we show that the topological Chern number can be detected through measuring the density profiles of the bosonic atoms in a harmonic trap.
In condensed-matter physics, electronic Mott insulators have triggered considerable research due to their intricate relation with high-temperature superconductors. However, unlike atomic systems for which Mott phases were recently shown for both bosonic and fermionic species, in the solid-state the fingerprint of a Mott insulator implemented with bosons is yet to be found. Here we unveil such signature by exploring the Bose-Hubbard hamiltonian using semiconductor excitons confined in two-dimensional lattices. We emphasise the regime where on-site interactions are comparable to the energy separ…
We investigate one dimensional SU$(N)$ Hubbard chains at zero temperature, which can be emulated with ultracold alkaline earth atoms, by using the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG), Bethe ansatz (BA), and bosonization. We compute experimental observables and use the DMRG to benchmark the accuracy of the Bethe ansatz for $N>2$ where the BA is only approximate. In the worst case, we find a relative error $ε\lesssim 4%$ in the BA ground state energy for $N \leq 4$ at filling 1/N, which is due to the fact that BA improperly treats the triply and higher occupied states. Using the DMRG for…
We present an experimental study demonstrating the manipulation of atom-number distributions of spinor gases after nonequilibrium quantum quenches across superfluid to Mott-insulator phase transitions in cubic optical lattices. Our data indicate that atom distributions in individual Mott lobes can be tuned by properly designing quantum quench sequences, which suggests methods of maximizing the fraction of atoms in Mott lobes of even occupation numbers and has applications in attaining different quantum magnetic phases including massively entangled states. Spatial distributions of gases in thre…
Using both fluid and kinetic descriptions, where repulsive forces between near by atoms are included, we discuss the basic oscillations and waves of a cloud of ultra-cold atoms confined in a magneto-optical trap. The existence of a hybrid mode, with properties similar to both plasma and acoustic waves is described in detail. Tonks-Dattner resonances for confined hybrid modes in a spherical cloud are discussed and the prediction of a nonlinear coupling between the dipole resonanc and the hybrid modes is considered. Landau damping processes and quasi-linear diffusion in velocity space are also d…
We present a wide array of quantum measures on numerical solutions of 1D Bose- and Fermi-Hubbard Hamiltonians for finite-size systems with open boundary conditions. Finite size effects are highly relevant to ultracold quantum gases in optical lattices, where an external trap creates smaller effective regions in the form of the celebrated "wedding cake" structure and the local density approximation is often not applicable. Specifically, for the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian we calculate number, quantum depletion, local von-Neumann entropy, generalized entanglement or Q-measure, fidelity, and fidelit…
We study matter wave scattering from an ultracold, many body atomic system trapped in an optical lattice. We determine the angular cross section that a matter wave probe sees and show that it is strongly affected by the many body phase, superfluid or Mott insulator, of the target lattice. We determine these cross sections analytically in the first Born approximation, and we examine the variation at intermediate points in the phase transition by numerically diagonalizing the Bose Hubbard Hamiltonian for a small lattice. We show that matter wave scattering offers a convenient method for non-dest…
Synthetic spin-orbit coupling in ultracold atomic gases can be taken to extremes rarely found in solids. We study a two dimensional Hubbard model of bosons in an optical lattice in the presence of spin-orbit coupling strong enough to drive direct transitions from Mott insulators to superfluids. Here we find phase-modulated superfluids with finite momentum that are generated entirely by spin-orbit coupling. We investigate the rich phase patterns of the superfluids, which may be directly probed using time-of-flight imaging of the spin-dependent momentum distribution.
Recent progress in optically trapped ultracold atomic gases is now making it possible to access microscopic observables in doped Mott insulators, which are the parent states of high-temperature superconductors. This makes it possible to address longstanding questions about the temperature scales at which attraction between charge carriers are present, and their mechanism. Controllable theoretical results for this problem are not available at low temperature due to the sign problem. In this work, we employ worm-algorithm Monte Carlo to obtain completely unbiased results for two charge carriers …
We present a numerical study of the dynamic response of a confined superfluid Fermi gas to a rapid change of the scattering length (i.e., an interaction quench). Based on a fully microscopic time-dependent density-matrix approach within the full Bogoliubov-de Gennes formalism that includes a 3D harmonic confinement we simulate and identify the emergence of a Goldstone mode of the BCS gap in a cigar-shaped $^6$Li gas. By analyzing this Goldstone mode over a wide range of parameters, we show that its excitation spectrum is gapless and that its main frequency is not fixed by the trapping potentia…
We show that a time-dependent magnetic field inducing a periodically modulated scattering length may lead to interesting novel scenarios for cold gases in optical lattices, characterized by a nonlinear hopping depending on the number difference at neighboring sites. We discuss the rich physics introduced by this hopping, including pair superfluidity, exactly defect-free Mott-insulator states for finite hopping, and pure holon and doublon superfluids. We also address experimental detection, showing that the introduced nonlinear hopping may lead in harmonically trapped gases to abrupt drops in t…
We investigate strongly correlated spin-1 ultracold bosons with antiferromagnetic interactions in a cubic optical lattice, based on bosonic dynamical mean-field theory. Rich phase diagrams of the system are mapped out at both zero and finite temperature, and in particular the existence of a spin-singlet condensate is established. Interestingly, at finite temperature, we find that the superfluid can be heated into a Mott insulator with even (odd) filling via a first- (second-) order phase transition, analogous to the Pomeranchuk effect in $^{3}$He. Moreover, for typical experimental setups, we …
We perform a numeric study (Worm algorithm Monte Carlo simulations) of ultracold two-component bosons in two-dimensional optical lattices. We study how the Mott insulator to superfluid transition is affected by the presence of a second superfluid bosonic species. We find that, at fixed interspecies interaction, the upper and lower boundaries of the Mott lobe are differently modified. The lower boundary is strongly renormalized even for relatively low filling factor of the second component and moderate (interspecies) interaction. The upper boundary, instead, is affected only for large enough fi…
We demonstrate spin gradient thermometry, a new general method of measuring the temperature of ultracold atoms in optical lattices. We realize a mixture of spins separated by a magnetic field gradient. Measurement of the width of the transition layer between the two spin domains serves as a new method of thermometry which is observed to work over a broad range of lattice depths and temperatures, including in the Mott insulator regime. We demonstrate the thermometry in a system of ultracold rubidium atoms, and suggest that interesting spin physics can be realized in this system. The lowest meas…
We present a time-independent quantum formalism to describe the dynamics of molecules with permanent electric dipole moments in a two-dimensional confined geometry such as a one-dimensional optical lattice, in the presence of an electric field. Bose/Fermi statistics and selection rules play a crucial role in the dynamics. As examples, we compare the dynamics of confined fermionic and bosonic polar KRb molecules under different confinements and electric fields. We show how chemical reactions can be suppressed, either by a "statistical suppression" which applies for fermions at small electric fi…
We show that the excitation of long-range Rydberg molecules in a three-dimensional optical lattice can be used as a position- and time-sensitive probe of the site occupancy in the system. To this end, we detect the ions which are continuously generated by the decay of the formed Rydberg molecules. While a superfluid gas shows molecule formation for all parameters, a Mott insulator with $n=1$ filling reveals a strong suppression of the number of formed molecules. In the limit of weak probing, the technique can be used to probe the superfluid to Mott-insulator transition in real-time. Our method…
Ultracold atomic gases provide a fantastic platform to implement quantum simulators and investigate a variety of models initially introduced in condensed matter physics or other areas. One of the most promising applications of quantum simulation is the study of strongly-correlated Fermi gases, for which exact theoretical results are not always possible with state-of-the-art approaches. Here, we review recent progress of the quantum simulation of the emblematic Fermi-Hubbard model with ultracold atoms. After introducing the Fermi-Hubbard model in the context of condensed matter, its implementat…
We consider a one-dimensional bosonic gas on a ring lattice, in the presence of a localized barrier, and under the effect of an artificial gauge field. By means of exact diagonalization we study the persistent currents at varying interactions and barrier strength, for various values of lattice filling. While generically the persistent currents are strongly suppressed in the Mott insulator phase, they show a resonant behaviour when the barrier strength becomes of the order of the interaction energy. We explain this phenomenon using an effective single-particle model. We show that this effect is…
Near zero temperature, quantum magnetism can non-trivially arise from short-range interactions, but the occurrence of magnetic order depends crucially on the interplay of interactions, lattice geometry, dimensionality and doping. Even though the consequences of this interplay are not yet fully understood, quantum magnetism is believed to be connected to a range of complex phenomena in the solid state, for example, in the context of high-$T_c$ superconductivity and spin liquids in frustrated lattices. Ultracold atomic Fermi gases in optical lattices constitute an experimental system with unriva…
The Fermi-Hubbard model (FHM) is a cornerstone of modern condensed matter theory. Developed for interacting electrons in solids, which typically exhibit SU($2$) symmetry, it describes a wide range of phenomena, such as metal to insulator transitions and magnetic order. Its generalized SU($N$)-symmetric form, originally applied to multi-orbital materials such as transition-metal oxides, has recently attracted much interest owing to the availability of ultracold SU($N$)-symmetric atomic gases. Here we report on a detailed experimental investigation of the SU($N$)-symmetric FHM using local probin…
We study the Mott transition of a mixed Bose-Fermi system of ultracold atoms in an optical lattice, where the number of (spinless) fermions and bosons adds up to one atom per lattice, n_F+n_B=1. For weak interactions, a Fermi surface coexists with a Bose-Einstein condensate while for strong interaction the system is incompressible but still characterized by a Fermi surface of composite fermions. At the critical point, the spectral function of the fermions, A(k,w), exhibits a pseudo-gapped behavior, rising as |w| at the Fermi momentum, while in the Mott phase it is fully gapped. Taking into acc…
The Mott insulator-superfluid transition for ultracold bosonic atoms in an optical lattice has been extensively studied in the framework of the Bose-Hubbard model with two-body on-site interactions. In this paper, we analyze the additional effect of the three-body on-site interactions on this phase transition in optical lattice and the transitions between the various phases that arise in an optical superlattice. Using the mean-field theory and the density matrix renormalization group method, we find the phase diagrams depicting the relationships between various physical quantities in an optica…
Mott insulators are paradigms of strongly correlated physics, giving rise to phases of matter with novel and hard-to-explain properties. Extending the typical SU(2) symmetry of Mott insulators to SU($N$) is predicted to give exotic quantum magnetism at low temperatures, but understanding the effect of strong quantum fluctuations for large $N$ remains an open challenge. In this work, we experimentally observe nearest-neighbor spin correlations in the SU(6) Hubbard model realized by ytterbium atoms in optical lattices. We study one-dimensional, two-dimensional square, and three-dimensional cubic…
We observe evidence of first-order superfluid to Mott-insulator quantum phase transitions in a lattice-confined antiferromagnetic spinor Bose-Einstein condensate. The observed signatures include hysteresis effect and significant heatings across the phase transitions. The nature of the phase transitions is found to strongly depend on the ratio of the quadratic Zeeman energy to the spin-dependent interaction. Our observations are qualitatively understood by the mean field theory, and in addition suggest tuning the quadratic Zeeman energy is a new approach to realize superfluid to Mott-insulator …
