We investigate the attractive Hubbard model in infinite spatial dimensions by means of dynamical mean-field theory. Using a continuous-time Monte Carlo algorithm in the Nambu formalism as an impurity solver, we directly deal with the superfluid phase in the population imbalanced system. By calculating the superfluid order parameter, the magnetization, and the density of states, we discuss how the polarized superfluid state is realized in the attractive Hubbard model at quarter filling. We find that a drastic change in the density of states is induced by spin imbalanced populations in the superfluid state.
The induced intraspecies interactions among the majority species, mediated by the minority species, is computed for a population-imbalanced two-component Fermi gas. Although the Feshbach-resonance mediated interspecies interaction is dominant for equal populations, leading to singlet s-wave pairing, we find that in the strongly imbalanced regime the induced intraspecies interaction leads to p-wave pairing and superfluidity of the majority species. Thus, we predict that the observed spin-polaron Fermi liquid state in this regime is unstable to p-wave superfluidity, in accordance with the result…
We study superfluidity in the 1D Bose-Hubbard model using a variational matrix product state technique. We determine the superfluid density as a function of the Hubbard parameters by calculating the energy cost of phase twists in the thermodynamic limit. As the system is critical, correlation functions decay as power laws and the entanglement entropy grows with the bond dimension of our variational state. We relate the resulting scaling laws to the superfluid density. We compare two different algorithms for optimizing the infinite matrix product state and develop a physical explanation why one…
We study fermion pairing in a population-imbalanced mixture of $^{6}$Li atomic gas loaded in a three-dimensional lattice at very low temperatures. Using the number equation for each population, the gap equation and the equation for the Helmholtz free energy, we determine the gap, chemical potentials and pair-momentum as functions of polarization. These parameters define the stability regions for: a Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov phase; a phase separation region where BCS and normal phases coexist; a Sarma phase when the pair-momentum vanishes, and the transition to the normal phase when the …
We present an extensive study of two-dimensional Larkin-Ovchinnikov (LO) superfluidity in a spin-imbalanced two-component atomic Fermi gas. In the context of Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin- Ovchinnikov (FFLO) phase, we explore a wide and generic class of pairing gap functions with ex- plicit spatial dependency. The mean-field theory of such phases is applied through the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations in which the pairing gap can be determined self-consistently. In order to systemat- ically explore the configuration space we consider both the canonical and grand canonical ensembles where we control the p…
The induced interaction among the majority spin species, due to the presence of the minority species, is computed for the case of a population-imbalanced resonantly-interacting Fermi gas. It is shown that this interaction leads to an instability, at low temperatures, of the recently observed polaron Fermi liquid phase of strongly imbalanced Fermi gases to a p-wave superfluid state. We find that the associated transition temperature, while quite small in the weakly interacting BCS regime, is experimentally accessible in the strongly interacting unitary regime.
We investigate the ground-state phase diagram of the one-dimensional attractive Fermi-Hubbard model with spin-dependent hoppings and an on-site Rabi coupling using the density matrix renormalization group method. In particular, we show that even in the limit of one component being immobile the pair superfluidity can be resonantly enhanced when the Rabi coupling is on the order of the interaction strength just before the system starts to strongly polarize. We derive an effective spin-1/2 XXZ model in order to understand the ground-state properties in the strong attraction limit.
We study pairing formation and the appearance of induced spin-triplet p-wave superfluidity in dilute three-dimensional imbalanced Fermi gases in the presence of a uniform non-Abelian gauge field. This gauge field generates a synthetic Rashba-type spin-orbit interaction which has remarkable consequences in the induced p-wave pairing gaps. Without the synthetic gauge field, the p-wave pairing occurs in one of the components due to the induced (second-order) interaction via an exchange of density fluctuations in the other component. We show that this p-wave superfluid gap induced by density fluct…
We present an overview of recent developments in species-imbalanced ("polarized") Feshbach-resonant Fermi gases. We summarize the current status of thermodynamics of these systems in terms of a phase diagram as a function of the Feshbach resonance detuning, polarization and temperature. We review instabilities of the s-wave superfluidity across the BEC-BCS crossover to phase separation, FFLO states, polarized molecular superfluidity and the normal state, driven by the species imbalance. We discuss different models and approximations of this system and compare their predictions to current exper…
We theoretically study a possible new pairing mechanism for a two-dimensional population imbalanced Fermi gas with short-range repulsive interactions which can be realized on the upper branch of a Feshbach resonance. We use a well-controlled renormalization group approach, which allows an unbiased study of the instabilities of imbalanced Fermi liquid without assumption of a broken symmetry and gives a numerical calculation of the transition temperature from microscopic parameters. Our results show a leading superfluid instability in the p-wave channel for the majority species. The correspondin…
We use cluster dynamical mean field theory to study the phase diagram of the square lattice bilayer Hubbard model with an interlayer interaction. The layers are populated by two-component fermions, and the densities in both layers and the strength of the interactions are varied. We find that an attractive interlayer interaction can induce a checkerboard density ordered phase and superfluid phases, with either interlayer or intralayer pairing. Remarkably, the latter phase does not require an intralayer interaction to be present: it can be attributed to an induced attractive interaction caused b…
We study fermionic superfluidity in strongly anisotropic optical lattices with attractive interactions utilizing the cluster DMFT method, and focusing in particular on the role of non-local quantum fluctuations. We show that non-local quantum fluctuations impact the BCS superfluid transition dramatically. Moreover, we show that exotic superfluid states with delicate order parameter structure, such as the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov phase driven by spin population imbalance, can emerge even in the presence of such strong fluctuations.
Motivated by the experimental realization of synthetic spin-orbit coupling for ultracold atoms, we investigate the phase diagram of the Bose Hubbard model in a non-abelian gauge field in two dimensions. Using a strong coupling expansion in the combined presence of spin-orbit coupling and tunable interactions, we find a variety of interesting magnetic Hamiltonians in the Mott insulator (MI), which support magnetic textures such as spin spirals and vortex and Skyrmion crystals. An inhomogeneous mean field treatment shows that the superfluid (SF) phases inherit these exotic magnetic orders from t…
We study the zero temperature phase diagram of an imbalanced bilayer of dipolar fermions. We consider perpendicularly aligned identical dipoles in two layers and investigate the effect of population imbalance on the ground state phase at different layer spacings and average densities. The attractive part of the interlayer interaction could lead to the BEC-BCS crossover and the Fermi surface mismatch between two layers results in interesting uniform and nonuniform superfluid phases, which we have investigated here using the BCS mean-field theory together with the superfluid-mass density criteri…
We obtain a phase diagram of the spin imbalanced Hubbard model on the Lieb lattice, which is known to feature a flat band in its single-particle spectrum. Using the BCS mean-field theory for multiband systems, we find a variety of superfluid phases with imbalance. In particular, we find four different types FFLO phases, i.e. superfluid phases with periodic spatial modulation. They differ by the magnitude and direction of the centre-of-mass momentum of Cooper pairs. We also see a large region of stable Sarma phase, where the density imbalance is associated with zero Cooper pair momentum. In the…
We investigate the superfluidity and the coherence in dipolar binary Bose mixtures using the hydrodynamic approach. Useful analytical formulas for the excitations spectrum, the correlation function, the static structure factor, and the superfluid fraction are derived. We find that in the case of highly imbalanced mixture, the superfluidity can occur in the dilute component only at extremely low temperatures. The behavior of the first-order correlation function for both dipolar and nondipolar Bose mixtures is deeply analyzed. Then we face the two-dimensional case which encodes a non-trivial phy…
With use of the U(1) quantum rotor method in the path integral effective action formulation, we have confirmed the mathematical similarity of the phase Hamiltonian and of the extended Bose-Hubbard model with density-induced tunneling (DIT). Moreover, we have shown that the latter model can be mapped to a pseudospin Hamiltonian that exhibits two coexisting (single-particle and pair) superfluid phases. Phase separation of the two has also been confirmed, determining that there exists a range of coefficients in which only pair condensation, and not single-particle superfluidity, is present. The D…
We show that photon number measurement can be used to detect superfluidity for a two-band Bose-Hubbard model coupled to a cavity field. The atom-photon coupling induces transitions between the two internal atomic levels and results in entangled polaritonic states. In the presence of a cavity field, we find different photon numbers in the Mott-insulating versus superfluid phases, providing a method of distinguishing the atomic phases by photon counting. Furthermore, we examine the dynamics of the photon field after a rapid quench to zero atomic hopping by increasing the well depth. We find a ro…
We study a nonequilibrium dynamics of a one-dimensional spin-imbalanced Fermi-Hubbard model following a quantum quench of on-site interaction, realizable, for example, in Feshbach-resonant atomic Fermi gases. We focus on the post-quench evolution starting from the initial BCS and FuldeFerrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) ground states and analyze the corresponding spin-singlet, spin-triplet, density-density, and magnetization-magnetization correlation functions. We find that beyond a light-cone crossover time, rich post-quench dynamics leads to thermalized and pre-thermalized stationary states th…
A semiclassical theory is provided for the metastability regime-diagram of atomtronic superfluid circuits. Such circuits typically exhibit high-dimensional chaos; and non-linear resonances that couple the Bogoliubov excitations manifest themselves. Contrary to the expectation these resonances do not originate from the familiar Beliaev and Landau damping terms. Rather, they are described by a variant of the Cherry Hamiltonian of celestial mechanics. Consequently we study the induced decay process, and its dependence on the number of sites and of condensed particles.
We study the zero temperature ground state of a two-dimensional atomic Fermi gas with chemical potential and population imbalance in the mean-field approximation. All calculations are performed in terms of the two-body binding energy $ε_B$, whose variation allows to investigate the evolution from the BEC to the BCS regimes. By means of analytical and exact expressions we show that, similarly to what is found in three dimensions, at fixed chemical potentials, BCS is the ground state until the critical imbalance $h_c$ after which there is a first-order phase transition to the normal state. We fi…
Despite the multi-band spectrum of the widely-known Hofstadter butterfly, it turns out that the pairing correlations of the time-reversal-symmetric Hofstadter-Hubbard model are well-described by a single order parameter that is uniform in real space. By exploiting a BCS mean-field theory for the nearly-flat butterfly-bands regime of low magnetic-flux limit, here we reveal a number of unusual superfluid properties both in the ground state and at finite temperatures. Our thorough analysis includes but is not limited to the order parameter, condensate and superfluid fractions, and the critical BC…
The suppression of antiferromagnetic ordering in geometrically frustrated Hubbard models leads to a variety of exotic quantum phases including quantum spin liquids and chiral states. Here, we focus on the Hubbard model on one of the simplest frustrated lattice geometries, a triangular lattice. Motivated by the recent realization of ultracold fermionic atoms in triangular optical lattices, we study the properties of the triangular-lattice Hubbard model through a Numerical Linked-Cluster Expansion algorithm. We investigate the Mott insulator transition finding a critical interaction $U_c/t = 7.0…
We study superconducting properties of population-imbalanced ultracold Fermi mixtures in the honeycomb lattice that can be effectively described by the spin-imbalanced attractive Hubbard model in the presence of a Zeeman magnetic field. We use the mean-field theory approach to obtain ground state phase diagrams including some unconventional superconducting phases such as the Fulde--Ferrell--Larkin--Ovchinnikov (FFLO) phase. We show that this phase is characterized by atypical behaviour of the Cooper pairs total momentum in the external magnetic field. We show that the momentum changes its valu…
The hallmark of superfluidity is the appearance of metastable flow-states that carry a persistent circulating current. Considering Bose-Hubbard superfluid rings, we clarify the role of "quantum chaos" in this context. We show that the standard Landau and Bogoliubov superfluidity criteria fail for such low-dimensional circuits. We also discuss the feasibility for a coherent operation of a SQUID-like setup. Finally, we address the manifestation of the strong many-body dynamical localization effect.
The ground state and transport properties of the Lieb lattice flat band in the presence of an attractive Hubbard interaction are considered. It is shown that the superfluid weight can be large even for an isolated and strictly flat band. Moreover the superfluid weight is proportional to the interaction strength and to the quantum metric, a band structure invariant obtained from the flat-band Bloch functions. These predictions are amenable to verification with ultracold gases and may explain the anomalous behaviour of the superfluid weight of high-Tc superconductors.
Building on recent solutions of the fermion sign problem for specific models we present two continuous-time quantum Monte Carlo methods for efficient simulation of mass-imbalanced Hubbard models on bipartite lattices at half-filling. For both methods we present the solutions to the fermion sign problem and the algorithms to achieve efficient simulations. As applications, we calculate the dependence of the spin correlation on the mass imbalance in a one-dimensional lattice and study the thermal and quantum phase transitions to an antiferromagnetic Ising long-range ordered state in two dimension…
We analyze the finite-temperature phase diagram of the boson-fermion-Hubbard model with Feshbach converting interaction, using the coherent-state path-integral method. We show that depending on the position of the bosonic band, this type of interaction, even if weak, can drive the system into the resonant superfluid phase in the strong bosonic interaction limit. It turns out that this phase can exist for an arbitrary number of fermions (i.e., fermionic concentration between 0 and 2) but with the bosonic particle number very close to an integer value. We point out that the standard time-of-flig…
We investigate the attractive Hubbard model in infinite spatial dimensions at quarter filling. By combining dynamical mean-field theory with continuous-time quantum Monte Carlo simulations in the Nambu formalism, we directly deal with the superfluid phase in the population imbalanced system. We discuss the low energy properties in the polarized superfluid state and the pseudogap behavior in the vicinity of the critical temperature.
The collective excitations that minimize the Helmholtz free energy of a population-imbalanced mixture of a $^{6}$Li gas loaded in a quasi one-dimensional optical lattice are obtained. These excitations reveal a rotonic branch after solving the Bethe-Salpeter equation under a generalized random phase approximation based on a single-band Hubbard Hamiltonian. The phase diagram describing stability regions of Fulde-Farrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov and Sarma phases is also analyzed.
One of the major challenges in realizing antiferromagnetic and superfluid phases in optical lattices is the ability to cool fermions. We determine constraints on the entropy for observing these phases in two-dimensional Hubbard models. We investigate antiferromagnetic correlations in the repulsive model at half filling and superfluidity of s-wave pairs in the attractive case away from half filling using determinantal quantum Monte Carlo simulations that are free of the fermion sign problem. We find that an entropy per particle ~log(2) is sufficient to observe the charge gap in the repulsive Hu…
We investigate the superfluid properties of d-wave pairing symmetry within the Extended Hubbard Model (EHM) in a magnetic field. We analyze the temperature and magnetic field dependencies of the order parameter. We find that in the two-dimensional case, the spatially homogeneous spin polarized superfluidity ($SC(P\neq0)$) is stable in the weak coupling limit, at T=0, as opposed to the s-wave pairing symmetry case in 2D. We construct the ground state phase diagrams both for fixed chemical potential ($μ$) and electron concentration ($n$). Furthermore, we obtain the temperature vs. magnetic field…
We study the interplay between the Hofstadter butterfly, strong interactions and Zeeman field within the mean-field Bogoliubov-de Gennes theory in real space, and explore the ground states of the attractive single-band Hofstadter-Hubbard Hamiltonian on a square lattice, including the exotic possibility of imbalanced vector potentials. We find that the cooperation between the vector potential and superfluid order breaks the spatial symmetry of the system, and flourish stripe-ordered Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO)-like superfluid and supersolid phases that can be distinguished and chara…
Constraints in the dynamics of quantum many-body systems can dramatically alter transport properties and relaxation timescales even in the absence of static disorder. Here, we report on the observation of such constrained dynamics arising from the distinct mobility of two species in the one-dimensional mass-imbalanced Fermi-Hubbard model, realized with ultracold ytterbium atoms in a state-dependent optical lattice. By displacing the trap potential and monitoring the subsequent dynamical response of the system, we identify suppressed transport and slow relaxation with a strong dependence on the…
We use unbiased computational methods to elucidate the onset and properties of pair superfluidity in two-species fermionic and bosonic systems with onsite interspecies attraction loaded in one-dimensional optical lattice. We compare results from quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) and density matrix renormalization group (DMRG), emphasizing the one-to-one correspondence between the Drude weight tensor, calculated with DMRG, and the various winding numbers extracted from the QMC. Our results show that, for any nonvanishing attractive interaction, pairs form and are the sole contributors to superfluidity,…
We explore novel features of a nonrelativistic fermionic superfluid in which the pairing interaction includes a contribution from the exchange of a dynamical bosonic mode. We show that the dynamical boson exchange (DBE), which causes a retarded pairing interaction and thus violates the Galilean invariance of the fermion sector, generically leads to a quantum reduction of the superfluid density and hence a nonzero normal fraction even at zero temperature. For spin-singlet pairing, the DBE also leads to a nonvanishing spin susceptibility at zero temperature, providing a mechanism for the coexist…
We study the superfluid behavior of a population imbalanced ultracold atomic Fermi gases with a short range attractive interaction in a one-dimensional (1D) optical lattice, using a pairing fluctuation theory. We show that, besides widespread pseudogap phenomena and intermediate temperature superfluidity, the superfluid phase is readily destroyed except in a limited region of the parameter space. We find a new mechanism for pair hopping, assisted by the excessive majority fermions, in the presence of continuum-lattice mixing, which leads to an unusual constant BEC asymptote for $T_c$ that is i…
We investigate the possibility of excitonic superfluidity in electron-hole bilayers. We calculate the phase diagram of the system for the whole range of electron-hole density imbalance and for different degrees of electrostatic screening, using mean-field theory and a Ginzburg-Landau expansion. We are able to resolve differences on previous work in the literature which concentrated on restricted regions of the parameter space. We also give detailed descriptions of the pairing wavefunction in the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov paired state. The Ginzburg-Landau treatment allows us to investiga…
The ground-state properties of the Hubbard chain with on-site repulsion and anisotropic nearest-neighbor attraction are investigated by means of density matrix renormalization group calculations. The non-local attraction acts between fermions of one spin component only, mimicking the effect of p-wave Feshbach resonances in cold-atom systems. We analyze the onset of itinerant ferromagnetism, pinpointing the critical attraction strength where partially and fully ferromagnetic states occur. In the cold-atom setup, where the two (pseudo) spin populations are separately conserved, ferromagnetism oc…
We use Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations to study the pairing mechanism in a one-dimensional fermionic system governed by the Hubbard model with attractive contact interaction and with imbalance between the two spin populations. This is done for the uniform system and also for the system confined in a harmonic trap to compare with experiments on confined ultra-cold atoms. In the uniform case we determine the phase diagram in the polarization-temperature plane and find that the "Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov" (FFLO) phase is robust and persists to higher temperature for higher polarizati…
We consider two-component one-dimensional quantum gases at special imbalanced commensurabilities which lead to the formation of multimer (multi-particle bound-states) as the dominant order parameter. Luttinger liquid theory supports a mode-locking mechanism in which mass (or velocity) asymmetry is identified as the key ingredient to stabilize such states. While the scenario is valid both in the continuum and on a lattice, the effects of umklapp terms relevant for densities commensurate with the lattice spacing are also mentioned. These ideas are illustrated and confronted with the physics of t…
We study the superfluid weight $D^s$ and Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition temperatures $T_{BKT}$ in case of exotic Fulde-Ferrell (FF) superfluid states in lattice systems. We consider spin-imbalanced systems with and without spin-orbit coupling (SOC) accompanied with in-plane Zeeman field. By applying mean-field theory, we derive general equations for $D^s$ and $T_{BKT}$ in the presence of SOC and the Zeeman fields for 2D Fermi-Hubbard lattice models, and apply our results to a 2D square lattice. We show that conventional spin-imbalanced FF states without SOC can be observed at…
The late-time dynamics of quantum many-body systems is organized in distinct dynamical universality classes, characterized by their conservation laws and thus by their emergent hydrodynamic transport. Here, we study transport in the one-dimensional Hubbard model with different masses of the two fermionic species. To this end, we develop a quantum Boltzmann approach valid in the limit of weak interactions. We explore the crossover from ballistic to diffusive transport, whose timescale strongly depends on the mass ratio of the two species. For timescales accessible with matrix product operators,…
We study a system of ultracold fermionic Potassium (40K) atoms in a three-dimensional optical lattice in the vicinity of an s-wave Feshbach resonance. Close to resonance, the system is described by a multi-band Bose-Fermi Hubbard Hamiltonian. We derive an effective lowest-band Hamiltonian in which the effect of the higher bands is incorporated by a self-consistent mean-field approximation. The resulting model is solved by means of Generalized Dynamical Mean-Field Theory. In addition to the BEC/BCS crossover we find a phase transition to a fermionic Mott insulator at half filling, induced by th…
We study two-species fermion gases with attractive interaction in two-dimensional optical lattices producing an array of elongated tube confinements. Focusing on the interplay of Cooper pairing, spin imbalance (or magnetization) and intertube tunneling, we find the pairing gap can exhibit oscillatory behavior both along and across the tubes, reminiscent of a Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) phase. We obtain a Bose-Hubbard-like phase diagram that shows that the magnetization of the system undergoes an incompressible-compressible transition as a function of magnetic field and intertube tu…
We consider repulsively-interacting cold fermionic atoms loaded on an optical ladder lattice in a trapping potential. The density-matrix renormalization-group method is used to numerically calculate the ground state for systematically varied values of interaction U and spin imbalance p in the Hubbard model on the ladder. The system exhibits rich structures, where a fully spin polarized phase, spatially separated from other domains in the trapping potential, appears for large enough U and p. The phase-separated ferromagnetism can be captured as a real-space image of the energy gap between the f…
The proof of the Luttinger theorem, which was originally given for a normal Fermi liquid with equal spin populations formally described by the exact many-body theory at zero temperature, is here extended to an approximate theory given in terms of a "conserving" approximation also with spin imbalanced populations. The need for this extended proof, whose underlying assumptions are here spelled out in detail, stems from the recent interest in superfluid trapped Fermi atoms with attractive inter-particle interaction, for which the difference between two spin populations can be made large enough th…
Motivated by recent experiments on atomic Dirac fermions in a tunable honeycomb optical lattice, we study the attractive Hubbard model of superfluidity in the anisotropic honeycomb lattice. At weak-coupling, we find that the maximum mean field pairing transition temperature, as a function of density and interaction strength, occurs for the case with isotropic hopping amplitudes. In this isotropic case, we go beyond mean field theory and study collective fluctuations, treating both pairing and density fluctuations for interaction strengths ranging from weak to strong coupling. We find evidence …
The presence of attractive interaction between fermions can lead to pairing and superfluidity in an optical lattice. The temperature needed to observe superfluidity is about a tenth of the tunneling energy in the optical lattice, and currently beyond experimental reach. However, at strong coupling the precursors to global superfluidity should be visible at achievable temperatures, in terms of fluctuating domains with strong pairing correlations. We explore this regime of the attractive two dimensional fermion Hubbard model, in the presence of a confining potential, using a new Monte Carlo tech…
We report our findings on quantum phase transitions in cold bosonic atoms in a one dimensional optical lattice using the finite size density matrix renormalization group method in the framework of the extended Bose-Hubbard model. We consider wide ranges of values for the filling factors and the nearest neighbor interactions. At commensurate fillings, we obtain two different types of charge density wave phases and a Mott insulator phase. However, departure from commensurate fillings yield the exotic supersolid phase where both the crystalline and the superfluid orders coexist. In addition, we o…
We use microscopic Bogoliubov-de Gennes formalism to explore the ground-state phase diagram of the single-band attractive Hofstadter-Hubbard model on a square lattice. We show that the interplay between the Hofstadter butterfly and superfluidity breaks spatial symmetry, and gives rise to stripe-ordered superfluid and supersolid phases in large parameter spaces. We also discuss the effects of a trapping potential and comment on the viability of observing stripe-ordered phases with cold Fermi gases.
We study the attractive Hubbard model with spin imbalance on two lattices featuring a flat band: the Lieb and kagome lattices. We present mean-field phase diagrams featuring exotic superfluid phases, similar to the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) state, whose stability is confirmed by dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT). The nature of the pairing is found to be richer than just the Fermi surface shift responsible for the usual FFLO state. The presence of a flat band allows for changes in the particle momentum distributions at null energy cost. This facilitates formation of nontrivial su…