The feasibility of realizing overscreened Kondo effect in ultra-cold Fermi gas of atoms with spin $s \ge \tfrac{3}{2}$ in the presence of a localized magnetic impurity atom is proved realistic. Specifying to a system of ultra cold $^{22}$Na Fermi gas and a trapped $^{197}$Au impurity, the mechanism of exchange interaction between the Na and Au atoms is elucidated and the exchange constant is found to be antiferromagnetic. The corresponding exchange Hamiltonian is derived, and the Kondo temperature is estimated at the order of $ 1 μ$K.
Within a weak-coupling renormalization group scheme, it is shown that the coupling renormalizes to the non-Fermi liquid fixed point.
We analyze a microscopic mechanism behind coexistence of a heavy Fermi liquid and geometric frustration in Kondo lattices. We consider a geometrically frustrated periodic Anderson model and demonstrate how orbital fluctuations lead to a Kondo-screened phase in the limit of extreme strong frustration when only local {\it singlet} states participate in the low-energy physics. We also propose a setup to realize and study this exotic state with $SU (3)$-symmetric alkaline-earth cold atoms.
We show that a composite spin-1/2 Kondo system can be formed by coupling a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) to the internal hyperfine states of a trapped ultracold atomic Fermi gas. Here, the SQUID, or flux qubit, acts as an effective magnetic impurity that induces spin-flip scattering near the Fermi energies of the trapped gas. Although the ultracold gas and SQUID are at vastly different temperatures, the formation of a strongly correlated Kondo state between the two systems is found when the gas is cooled below the Kondo temperature; this temperature regime is within curre…
We demonstrate that laser excitations can coherently induce a novel Kondo effect in ultracold atoms in optical lattices. Using a model of alkaline-earth fermions with two orbitals, it is shown that the optically coupled two internal states are dynamically entangled to form the Kondo-singlet state, overcoming the heating effect due to the irradiation. Furthermore, a lack of SU($N$) symmetry in the optical coupling provides a peculiar feature in the Kondo effect, which results in spin-selective renormalization of effective masses. We also discuss effects of interorbital exchange interactions, an…
Motivated by experimental advances on ultracold atoms coupled to a pumped optical cavity, we propose a scheme for synthesizing and observing the Kondo insulator in Fermi gases trapped in optical lattices. The synthetic Kondo phase arises from the screening of localized atoms coupled to mobile ones, which in our proposal is generated via the pumping laser as well as the cavity. By designing the atom-cavity coupling, it can engineer a nearest-neighbor-site Kondo coupling that plays an essential role for supporting topological Kondo phase. Therefore, the cavity-induced Kondo transition is associa…
We investigate the Kondo effect in an open quantum system, motivated by recent experiments with ultracold alkaline-earth(-like) atoms. Because of inelastic collisions and the associated atom losses, this system is described by a complex-valued Kondo interaction and provides a non-Hermitian extension of the Kondo problem. We show that the non-Hermiticity induces anomalous reversion of renormalization-group flows which violate the $g$-theorem due to non-unitarity and produce a quantum phase transition unique to non-Hermiticity. Furthermore, we exactly solve the non-Hermitian Kondo Hamiltonian us…
We propose an experimental protocol to directly observe the Kondo effect by scattering ultracold atoms with spin-dependent interactions. We propose using an optical Feshbach resonance to engineer Kondo-type spin-dependent interactions in a system with ultracold $^6$Li and $^{87}$Rb gases. We calculate the momentum transferred from the $^{87}$Rb gas to the $^6$Li gas in a scattering experiment and show that it has a logarithmically enhanced temperature dependence, characteristic of the Kondo effect and analogous to the resistivity of alloys with magnetic impurities. Experimentally detecting thi…
We propose that ultracold alkaline-earth-like atoms confined in one-dimensional optical lattice can realize a Kondo lattice model which hosts a symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phase and an associated quantum phase transition in a controllable manner. The symmetry protection of the phase transition is discussed from two different viewpoints: topological properties related to spatial patterns of Kondo singlets, and symmetry eigenvalues of the spin states. We uncover the role of various symmetries in the phase diagram of this system by combining a weak-coupling approach by Abelian bosonizati…
The Kondo effect in condensed-matter systems manifests itself most sharply in their transport measurements. Here we propose an analogous transport signature of the orbital Kondo effect realized with ultracold atoms. Our system consists of imbalanced Fermi seas of two components of fermions and an impurity atom of different species which is confined by an isotropic potential. We first apply a π/2 pulse to transform two components of fermions into two superposition states. Their interactions with the impurity atom then cause a "transport" of fermions from majority to minority superposition state…
We show that an interplay between quantum effects, strong on-site ferromagnetic exchange interaction and antiferromagnetic correlations in Kondo lattices can give rise to an exotic spin-orbit coupled metallic state in regimes where classical treatments predict a trivial insulating behavior. This phenomenon can be simulated with ultracold alkaline-earth fermionic atoms subject to a laser-induced magnetic field by observing dynamics of spin-charge excitations in quench experiments.
Motivated by recent progresses on ultracold alkaline-earth atoms towards the goal of simulating Kondo physics, in this work we exactly solve the few-body problem of one and two trapped fermions in one dimension interacting with a localized impurity under tunable spin-exchange interaction. It is found that depending on the sign of the spin-exchange coupling, ferromagnetic(FM) or anti-ferromagnetic(AFM), the attractive and repulsive branches can hold different magnetic structures. For the two fermions case, we demonstrate the Kondo screening effect for the attractive branch with AFM coupling, an…
Ultracold alkaline-earth atoms have now been widely explored for precision measurements and quantum simulation. Because of its unique atomic structure, alkaline earth atoms possess great advantages for quantum simulation and studying quantum many-body matters, such as simulating synthetic gauge field, Kondo physics and $SU(N)$ physics. To fully explore the potential of ultracold alkaline-earth atoms, these systems also need to be equipped with the capability of tuning the inter-atomic interaction to the strongly interacting regime. Recently several theoretical proposals and experimental demons…
The Kondo effect describes the spin-exchanging interaction between localized impurity and the itinerant fermions. The ultracold alkaline-earth atomic gas provides a natural platform for quantum simulation of the Kondo model, utilizing its long-lived clock state and the nuclear-spin exchanging interaction between the clock state and the ground state. One of the key issue now is whether the Kondo temperature can be high enough to be reached in current experiment, for which we have proposed using a transverse confinement to confine atoms into a one-dimensional tube and to utilize the confinement-…
We report on the experimental realization of a state-dependent lattice for a two-orbital fermionic quantum gas with strong interorbital spin exchange. In our state-dependent lattice, the ground and metastable excited electronic states of $^{173}$Yb take the roles of itinerant and localized magnetic moments, respectively. Repulsive on-site interactions in conjunction with the tunnel mobility lead to spin exchange between mobile and localized particles, modeling the coupling term in the well-known Kondo Hamiltonian. In addition, we find that this exchange process can be tuned resonantly by varyi…
Chemical reactions at ultracold temperature provide an ideal platform to study chemical reactivity at the fundamental level, and to understand how chemical reactions are governed by quantum mechanics. Recent years have witnessed the remarkable progress in studying ultracold chemistry with ultracold molecules. However, these works were limited to exothermic reactions. The direct observation of state-to-state ultracold endothermic reaction remains elusive. Here we report on the investigation of endothermic and nearly thermoneutral atom-exchange reactions in an ultracold atom-dimer mixture. By de…
The topological Kondo (TK) model has been proposed in solid-state quantum devices as a way to realize non-Fermi liquid behaviors in a controllable setting. Another motivation behind the TK model proposal is the demand to demonstrate the quantum dynamical properties of Majorana fermions, which are at the heart of their potential use in topological quantum computation. Here we consider a junction of crossed Tonks-Girardeau gases arranged in a star-geometry (forming a Y -junction), and we perform a theoretical analysis of this system showing that it provides a physical realization of the topologi…
Ultracold molecules offer remarkable opportunities to study chemical reactions at nearly zero temperature. Although significant progresses have been achieved in exploring ultracold bimolecular reactions, the investigations are usually limited to measurements of the overall loss rates of the reactants. Detection of the reaction products will shed new light on understanding the reaction mechanism and provide a unique opportunity to study the state-to-state reaction dynamics. Here we report on the direct observation of an exoergic atom-exchange reaction in an ultracold atom-dimer mixture. Both th…
We study the two-body problem of the ultracold fermionic alkaline-earth (like) atoms in the electronic $^1$S$_0$ state ($g$-state) and $^3$P$_0$ state ($e$-state), which are confined in a quasi-one-dimensional (quasi-1D) tube. In addition, in the axial direction, the $g$-atom experience a 1D optical lattice and the $e$-atom is localized by a harmonic potential. In this work, we propose two appropriate tight-binding models, which are applicable for the cases that the odd-wave scattering between the $g$- and $e$-atom is negligible or not, respectively. We further give a microscopic derivation fo…
We propose a scheme to realize the Kondo model with tunable anisotropy using alkaline-earth atoms in an optical lattice. The new feature of our setup is Floquet engineering of interactions using time-dependent Zeeman shifts, that can be realized either using state-dependent optical Stark shifts or magnetic fields. The properties of the resulting Kondo model strongly depend on the anisotropy of the ferromagnetic interactions. In particular, easy-plane couplings give rise to Kondo singlet formation even though microscopic interactions are all ferromagnetic. We discuss both equilibrium and dynami…
We develop an efficient variational approach to studying dynamics of a localized quantum spin coupled to a bath of mobile spinful bosons. We use parity symmetry to decouple the impurity spin from the environment via a canonical transformation and reduce the problem to a model of the interacting bosonic bath. We describe coherent time evolution of the latter using bosonic Gaussian states as a variational ansatz. We provide full analytical expressions for equations describing variational time evolution that can be applied to study in- and out-of-equilibrium phenomena in a wide class of quantum i…
A versatile and efficient variational approach is developed to solve in- and out-of-equilibrium problems of generic quantum spin-impurity systems. Employing the discrete symmetry hidden in spin-impurity models, we present a new canonical transformation that completely decouples the impurity and bath degrees of freedom. Combining it with Gaussian states, we present a family of many-body states to efficiently encode nontrivial impurity-bath correlations. We demonstrate its successful application to the anisotropic and two-lead Kondo models by studying their spatiotemporal dynamics and universal …
We discuss an even-odd effect for an impurity with an $N$-fold degenerate internal states immersed in a two-dimensional superfluid--Mott-insulator quantum critical bath, which is described by an spin-$S$ XY Bose-Kondo impurity model with $N=2S+1$. Using a dimensional- and momentum-cut off regularized renormalization group and unbiased large-scale Monte Carlo numerical simulations, we establish the phase diagram for the $S=1$ impurity with all the relevant terms included. We show that the $S=1$ impurity with 3-fold degeneracy is fully screened by the critical bath, in qualitative contrast to th…
A nuclear-spin exchange interaction exists between two ultracold fermionic alkali-earth (like) atoms in the electronic $^{1}{\rm S}_{0}$ state ($g$-state) and $^{3}{\rm P}_{0}$ state ($e$-state), and is an essential ingredient for the quantum simulation of Kondo effect. We study the control of this spin-exchange interaction for two atoms simultaneously confined in a quasi-one-dimensional (quasi-1D) tube, where the $g$-atom is freely moving in the axial direction while the $e$-atom is further localized by an additional axial trap and behaves as a quasi-zero-dimensional (quasi-0D) impurity. In t…
Ultracold gases of fermionic alkaline-earth (like) atoms are hopeful candidates for the quantum simulation of many-body physics induced by magnetic impurities (e.g., the Kondo physics), because there are spin-exchange interactions (SEIs) between two atoms in the electronic ground ($^1$S$_0$) and metastable ($^3$P) state, respectively. Nevertheless, this SEI cannot be tuned via magnetic Feshbach resonance. In this work we propose three methods to control the SEI between one atom in the $^1$S$_0$ state and another atom in the $^3$P$_2$ states or $^3$P$_2$-$^3$P$_0$ dressed states, with one or tw…
We consider dynamics of a Rydberg impurity in a cloud of ultracold bosonic atoms in which the Rydberg electron can undergo spin-changing collisions with surrounding atoms. This system realizes a new type of the quantum impurity problem that compounds essential features of the Kondo model, the Bose polaron, and the central spin model. To capture the interplay of the Rydberg-electron spin dynamics and the orbital motion of atoms, we employ a new variational method that combines an impurity-decoupling transformation with a Gaussian ansatz for the bath particles. We find several unexpected feature…
