We introduce a generic bosonic model exemplifying that (spin) Meissner currents can persist in insulating phases of matter. We consider two species of interacting bosons on a lattice. Our model exhibits separation of charge (total density) and spin (relative density): The charge sector is gapped in a bosonic Mott insulator phase with total density one, while the spin sector remains superfluid due to interspecies conversion. Coupling the spin sector to the gauge fields yields a spin Meissner effect reflecting the long-range spin superfluid coherence. We investigate the resulting phase diagram and describe other possible spin phases of matter in the Mott regime possessing chiral currents as well as a spin-density wave phase. The model presented here is realizable in Josephson junction arrays and in cold atom experiments.
Persisting Meissner state and incommensurate phases of hard-core boson ladders in a flux
利用密度矩阵重整化群（DMRG）算法和玻色化方法，对磁通中半填充硬核玻色两腿阶梯的相图进行了数值模拟。我们计算实验上可观察到的动量分布，以及横档电流，密度波和键序波关联函数，使我们能够识别莫特迈斯纳和莫特涡旋状态。我们跟踪从公度迈斯纳到非公度涡旋态的转变，并增加链间跳跃，直到临界值[Piraud et al. Phys. Rev. B v. 91，p. 140406（2015）]，在该临界值以上，迈斯纳态在任何通量下都是稳定的。对于接近$π$且低于临界跳跃的通量，我们观察到莫特涡旋状态中第二个不通约的形成，这在当前的实验中可以检测到。
Realization of strongly-interacting Meissner phases in large bosonic flux ladders
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität（路德维希-马克西米利安大学）；Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik（马克斯·普朗克量子光学研究所）；Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology (MCQST)（慕尼黑量子科学与技术中心）
We consider a system of weakly interacting bosons confined on a planar double ring lattice subjected to two artificial gauge fields. We determine its ground state by solving coupled discrete non-linear Schrödinger equations at mean field level. At varying inter-ring tunnel coupling, flux and interactions we identify the vortex, Meissner and biased-ladder phases also predicted for a bosonic linear ladder by a variational Ansatz. We also find peculiar features associated to the ring geometry, in particular parity effects in the number of vortices, and the appearance of a single vortex in the Mei…
By periodically driving a single bosonic Josephson junction (BJJ) with an impurity, a synthetic gauge field is generated in the Fock space of the system. At a critical synthetic gauge flux the ground state undergoes a quantum phase transition which is analogous to the Meissner-Abrikosov-vortex transition found in type-II superconductors with an applied magnetic field. A second quantum phase transition involving attractive interactions between the bosons of the BJJ is shown to enhance the sensitivity of the system to the Meissner-Abrikosov-vortex transition.
We investigate topological phase transitions driven by interaction and identify a novel topological Mott insulator state in one-dimensional fermionic optical superlattices through numerical density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) method. Remarkably, the low-energy edge excitations change from spin-1/2 fermionic single-particle modes to spin-1 bosonic collective modes across the phase transition. Due to spin-charge separation, the low-energy theory is governed by an effective spin superexchange model, whereas the charge degree of freedom is fully gapped out. Such topological Mott state can …
We consider a two leg bosonic ladder in a $U(1)$ gauge field with both interleg hopping and interleg repulsion. As a function of the flux, the interleg interaction converts the commensurate-incommensurate transition from the Meissner to a Vortex phase, into an Ising-type of transition towards a density wave phase. A disorder point is also found after which the correlation functions develop a damped sinusoid behavior signaling a melting of the vortex phase. We discuss the differences on the phase diagram for attractive and repulsive interleg interaction. In particular, we show how repulsion fav…
Ultracold bosonic atoms trapped in a two-leg ladder pierced by a magnetic field provide a minimal and quasi-one-dimensional instance to study the interplay between orbital magnetism and interactions. Using time-dependent matrix-product-states simulations, we investigate the properties of the so-called "Meissner" and "vortex" phases which appear in such system, focusing on experimentally accessible observables. We discuss how to experimentally monitor the phase transition, and show that the response to a modulation of the density imbalance between the two legs of the ladder is qualitatively dif…
We investigate the ground state and quantum dynamics of an interacting bosonic chain with the nonreciprocal hopping. In sharp contrast to its Hermitian counterpart, the ground state can support Mott insulators in systems with noninteger filling due to the competition between nonreciprocal hopping and the on-site interaction. For the quantum dynamics, conservation laws for non-Hermitian systems manifest a stark difference from their Hermitian counterpart. In particular, for any Hermitian operator that commutes with the Hamiltonian operator, its expectation value is guaranteed to be nonconserved…
Optical lattice systems offer the possibility of creating and tuning Dirac points which are present in the tight-binding lattice dispersions. For example, such a behavior can be achieved in the staggered flux lattice or honeycomb type of lattices. Here we focus on the strongly correlated bosonic dynamics in the vicinity of Dirac points. In particular, we investigate bosonic Mott insulator phase in which quasiparticle excitations have a simple particle-hole interpretation. We show that linear response dynamics around Dirac points, can be significantly engineered at least in two ways: by the typ…
We study two-component bosons on the Harper-Hofstadter model with two legs. The synthetic magnetic fields for the two types of bosons point to either the same direction or opposite directions. The bosons have hardcore intra-species interaction such that there can be no more than one boson of the same type on each lattice site. For certain filling factors in the absence of inter-species interaction, each component realizes a vortex Mott insulator with rung current or a Meissner superfluid without rung current. The system undergoes phase transitions to other phases as inter-species interaction i…
We demonstrate many-body multifractality of the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian's ground state in Fock space, for arbitrary values of the interparticle interaction. Generalized fractal dimensions unambiguously signal, even for small system sizes, the emergence of a Mott insulator, that cannot, however, be naively identified with a localized phase in Fock space. We show that the scaling of the derivative of any generalized fractal dimension with respect to the interaction strength encodes the critical point of the superfluid to Mott insulator transition, and provides an efficient way to accurately est…
We demonstrate a single-site and single-atom-resolved fluorescence imaging of a bosonic Mott insulator of $^7$Li atoms in an optical lattice. The fluorescence images are obtained by implementing Raman sideband cooling on a deep two-dimensional square lattice, where we collect scattered photons with a high numerical aperture objective lens. The square lattice is created by a folded retro-reflected beam configuration that can reach 2.5~mK lattice depth from a single laser source. The lattice beam is elliptically focused to have a large area with deep potential. On average 4,000 photons are colle…
We study the topological properties of an extended Bose-Hubbard model with cyclically modulated hopping and on-site potential parameters, which can be realized with ultracold bosonic atoms in a one-dimensional optical superlattice. We show that the interacting bosonic chain at half filling and in the deep Mott insulating regime can simulate bosonic Chern insulators with a topological phase diagram similar to that of the Haldane model of noninteracting fermions. Furthermore, we explore the topological properties of the ground state by calculating the many-body Chern number, the quasiparticle en…
We consider theoretically ultra-cold interacting bosonic atoms confined to a wire geometry and coupled to the field of an optical cavity. A spin-orbit coupling is induced via Raman transitions employing a cavity mode and a transverse running wave pump beam, the transition imprints a spatial dependent phase onto the atomic wavefunction. Adiabatic elimination of the cavity field leads to an effective Hamiltonian for the atomic degrees of freedom, with a self-consistency condition. We map the spin-orbit coupled bosonic wire to a bosonic ladder in a magnetic field, by discretizing the spatial dime…
The Bose-Hubbard model subjected to an effective magnetic field hosts a plethora of phases with different topological orders when tuning the chemical potential. Using the density matrix renormalization group method, we identify several gapped phases near the first Mott lobe at strong interactions. They are connected by a particle-hole symmetry to a variety of quantum Hall states stabilized at low fillings. We characterize phases of both particle and hole type and identify signatures compatible with Laughlin, Moore-Read, and Bosonic Integer Quantum Hall states by calculating the quantized Hall …
Quantum systems can undergo phase transitions and show distinct features in different phases. The corresponding transport properties can also vary significantly due to the underlying quantum phase. We investigate the transport behaviour of a two-legged bosonic ladder in a uniform gauge field, which is known to have a Meissner-like phase and a vortex phase in the absence of dissipation. The ladder is coupled to bosonic baths at different temperatures, and we study it using the non-equilibrium Green's function method. In particular, we show the presence of a chiral current and how it is affected…
We analyze quantum phase transitions in a system of optical lattice bosons coupled to an array of atomic quantum dots, or pseudospins-1/2. The system parallels the Bose-Hubbard model with a single difference of the direct tunneling between the lattice sites being replaced by an assisted tunneling via coupling to the atomic quantum dots. We calculate the phase diagram of the combined system, numerically within the Gutzwiller ansatz and analytically using the mean-field decoupling approximation. The result of the assisted Bose-Hubbard model is that the Mott-superfluid transition still takes plac…
We consider a system of weakly interacting bosons confined on a planar double lattice ring subjected to two artificial gauge fields. This system is known to display three phases, the Meissner phase where the flow of particles is carried at the edges of the system without transverse current, a vortex phase characterized by non-zero transverse current, and a biased-ladder phase, characterized by an imbalance of the population of the two rings. We use the Bogoliubov approximation to determine the excitation spectrum in the three phases, the dynamic structure factor and the quantum fluctuation cor…
The $AB_{N-1}$ chain is a system that consists of repeating a unit cell with $N$ sites, where between the $A$ and $B$ sites there is an energy difference of $λ$. We considered bosons in these special lattices and took into account the kinetic energy, the local two-body interaction, and the inhomogenous local energy in the Hamiltonian. We found the charge density wave (CDW) and superfluid and Mott insulator phases, and constructed the phase diagram for $N=2$ and $3$ at the thermodynamic limit. The system exhibited insulator phases for densities $ρ=α/N$, with $α$ being an integer. We obtained th…
We consider interacting bosonic particles on a two-leg triangular ladder in the presence of an artificial gauge field. We employ density matrix renormalization group numerical simulations and analytical bosonization calculations to study the rich phase diagram of this system. We show that the interplay between the frustration induced by the triangular lattice geometry and the interactions gives rise to multiple chiral quantum phases. Phase transition between superfluid to Mott-insulating states occur, which can have Meissner or vortex character. Furthermore, a state that explicitly breaks the …
