Trapping ultracold atoms in optical lattices enabled numerous breakthroughs uniting several disciplines. Coupling these systems to quantized light leads to a plethora of new phenomena and has opened up a new field of study. Here we introduce a physically novel source of competition in a many-body strongly correlated system: We prove that quantum backaction of global measurement is able to efficiently compete with intrinsic short-range dynamics of an atomic system. The competition becomes possible due to the ability to change the spatial profile of a global measurement at a microscopic scale comparable to the lattice period without the need of single site addressing. In coherence with a general physical concept, where new competitions typically lead to new phenomena, we demonstrate novel nontrivial dynamical effects such as large-scale multimode oscillations, long-range entanglement and correlated tunneling, as well as selective suppression and enhancement of dynamical processes beyond the projective limit of the quantum Zeno effect. We demonstrate both the break-up and protection of strongly interacting fermion pairs by measurement. Such a quantum optical approach introduces into many-body physics novel processes, objects, and methods of quantum engineering, including the design of many-body entangled environments for open systems.
We investigate long-range pairing interactions between ultracold fermionic atoms confined in an optical lattice which are mediated by the coupling to a cavity. In the absence of other perturbations, we find three degenerate pairing symmetries for a two-dimensional square lattice. By tuning a weak local atomic interaction via a Feshbach resonance or by tuning a weak magnetic field, the superfluid system can be driven from a topologically trivial s-wave to topologically ordered, chiral superfluids containing Majorana edge states. Our work points out a novel path towards the creation of exotic su…
A paradigm model of modern atom optics is studied, strongly interacting ultracold bosons in an optical lattice. This many-body system can be artificially opened in a controlled manner by modern experimental techniques. We present results based on a non-hermitian effective Hamiltonian whose quantum spectrum is analyzed. The direct access to the spectrum of the metastable many-body system allows us to easily identify relatively stable quantum states, corresponding to previously predicted solitonic many-body structures.
We report on the creation of an ultracold dipolar gas of fermionic $^{23}$Na$^{40}$K molecules in their absolute rovibrational and hyperfine ground state. Starting from weakly bound Feshbach molecules, we demonstrate hyperfine resolved two-photon transfer into the singlet ${\rm X}^1Σ^+ |v{=}0,J{=}0\rangle$ ground state, coherently bridging a binding energy difference of 0.65 eV via stimulated rapid adiabatic passage. The spin-polarized, nearly quantum degenerate molecular gas displays a lifetime longer than 2.5 s, highlighting NaK's stability against two-body chemical reactions. A homogeneous …
Exotic topologically protected zero modes with parafermionic statistics (also called fractionalized Majorana modes) have been proposed to emerge in devices fabricated from a fractional quantum Hall system and a superconductor. The fractionalized statistics of these modes takes them an important step beyond the simplest non-Abelian anyons, Majorana fermions. Building on recent advances towards the realization of fractional quantum Hall states of bosonic ultracold atoms, we propose a realization of parafermions in a system consisting of Bose-Einstein-condensate trenches within a bosonic fraction…
We investigate theoretically soliton excitations and dynamics of their formation in strongly correlated systems of ultracold bosonic atoms in two and three dimensional optical lattices. We derive equations of nonlinear hydrodynamics in the regime of strong interactions and incommensurate fillings, when atoms can be treated as hard core bosons. When parameters change in one direction only we obtain Korteweg-de Vries type equation away from half-filling and modified KdV equation at half-filling. We apply this general analysis to a problem of the decay of the density step. We consider stability o…
We study finite-temperature magnetic phases of three-component mixtures of ultracold fermions with repulsive interactions in optical lattices with simple cubic or square geometry by means of dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT). We focus on the case of one particle per site (1/3 band filling) at moderate interaction strength, where we observe a sequence of thermal phase transitions into two- and three-sublattice ordered states by means of the unrestricted real-space generalization of DMFT. From our quantitative analysis we conclude that long-range ordering in three-component mixtures should be o…
We study the dynamics of ultracold atoms trapped in optical double-well potentials in presence of noise generated by an external environment. When prepared in a Fock number state, the system shows phase coherence in the averaged density profile obtained using standard absorption image techniques, that disappears in absence of noise. This effect indicates that also in many-body systems an external environment may enhance quantum coherence, instead of destroying it.
We show that atomic Fermi mixtures with density and mass imbalance exhibit a rich diversity of scaling laws for the quasiparticle decay rate beyond the quadratic energy and temperature dependence of conventional Fermi liquids. For certain densities and mass ratios, the decay rate is linear whereas in other cases it exhibits a plateau. Remarkably, this plateau extends from the deeply degenerate to the high temperature classical regime of the light species. Many of these scaling laws are analogous to what is found in very different systems including dirty metals, liquid metals, and high temperat…
We extent the recently developed Multi-Layer Multi-Configuration Time-Dependent Hartree method for Bosons (ML-MCTDHB) for simulating the correlated quantum dynamics of bosonic mixtures to the fermionic sector and establish a unifying approach for the investigation of the correlated quantum dynamics of mixture of indistinguishable particles, be it fermions or bosons. Relying on a multi-layer wave-function expansion, the resulting Multi-Layer Multi-Configuration Time-Dependent Hartree method for Mixtures (ML-MCTDHX) can be adapted to efficiently resolve system-specific intra- and inter-species c…
In this work, which is based on our previously derived theoretical framework [1], we apply the truncated Born-Bogoliubov-Green-Kirkwood-Yvon (BBGKY) hierarchy for ultracold bosonic systems with a fixed number of particles to two out-of-equilibrium scenarios, namely tunneling in a double-well potential and an interaction quench in a harmonic trap. The efficient formulation of the theory provided in [1] allows for going to large truncation orders such that the impact of the truncation order on the accuracy of the results can be systematically explored. While the short-time dynamics is found to b…
We theoretically investigate the generation of microscopic atomic NOON states, corresponding to the coherent |N,0> + |0,N> superposition with N ~ 5 particles, via collective tunneling of interacting ultracold bosonic atoms within a symmetric double-well potential in the self-trapping regime. We show that a periodic driving of the double well with suitably tuned amplitude and frequency parameters allows one to substantially boost this tunneling process without altering its collective character. The time scale to generate the NOON superposition, which corresponds to half the tunneling time and w…
We examine the weakly interacting atoms in an ultracold Fermi gas leading to a state of macroscopic coherence, from a theoretical perspective. It has been shown that this state can be described as a fermionic coherent state. These coherent states are the eigenstates of fermionic annihilation operators, the eigenvalues being anti-commuting numbers or Grassmann numbers. By exploiting the simple rules of Grassmann algebra and a close kinship between relations evaluated for more familiar bosonic fields and those for fermionic fields, we derive the thermodynamic limit, the spontaneous symmetry brea…
The standard experimental techniques usually adopted in the study of the behaviour of ultracold atoms in optical lattices involve extracting the atom density profile from absorption images of the atomic sample after trap release. Quantum mechanically this procedure is described by a generalized measure (POVM); interference patterns found in absorption images suggest a generalized measure based on fixed-phase, coherent-like states. We show that this leads to an average atomic density which differs from the usually adopted one, obtained as the expectation value of the atom density operator in th…
A functional renormalisation group study for the BEC-BCS crossover for ultracold gases of fermionic atoms is presented. We discuss the fixed point which is at the origin of universality for broad Feshbach resonances. All macroscopic quantities depend only on one relevant parameter, the concentration a k_F, besides their dependence on the temperature in units of the Fermi energy. In particular, we compute the universal ratio between molecular and atomic scattering length in vacuum. We also present an estimate to which level of accuracy universality holds for gases of Li and K atoms.
Advances with trapped ultracold atoms intensified interest in simulating complex physical phenomena, including quantum magnetism and transitions from itinerant to non-itinerant behavior. Here we show formation of antiferromagnetic ground states of few ultracold fermionic atoms in single and double well (DW) traps, through microscopic Hamiltonian exact diagonalization for two DW arrangements: (i) two linearly oriented one-dimensional, 1D, wells, and (ii) two coupled parallel wells, forming a trap of two-dimensional, 2D, nature. The spectra and spin-resolved conditional probabilities reveal for …
It is shown that fermionic polar molecules or atoms in a bilayer optical lattice can undergo the transition to a state with circulating currents, which spontaneously breaks the time reversal symmetry. Estimates of relevant temperature scales are given and experimental signatures of the circulating current phase are identified. Related phenomena in bosonic and spin systems with ring exchange are discussed.
Transport properties are among the defining characteristics of many important phases in condensed matter physics. In the presence of strong correlations they are difficult to predict even for model systems like the Hubbard model. In real materials they are in general obscured by additional complications including impurities, lattice defects or multi-band effects. Ultracold atoms in contrast offer the possibility to study transport and out-of-equilibrium phenomena in a clean and well-controlled environment and can therefore act as a quantum simulator for condensed matter systems. Here we studie…
We study magnetic phases of two-component mixtures of ultracold fermions with repulsive interactions in optical lattices in the presence of hopping imbalance. Our analysis is based on dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) and its real-space generalization at finite temperature. We study the temperature dependence of the transition into the ordered state as a function of the interaction strength and the imbalance parameter in two and three spatial dimensions. We show that below the critical temperature for Néel order mass-imbalanced mixtures also exhibit a charge-density wave, which provides a dir…
Rapid advancements in the experimental capabilities with ultracold alkaline-earth-like atoms (AEAs) bring to a surprisingly near term the prospect of performing quantum simulations of spin models and lattice field theories exhibiting SU($N$) symmetry. Motivated in particular by recent experiments preparing high density samples of strongly interacting ${}^{87}$Sr atoms in a three-dimensional optical lattice, we develop a low-energy effective theory of fermionic AEAs which exhibits emergent multi-body SU($N$)-symmetric interactions, where $N$ is the number of atomic nuclear spin levels. Our theo…
Exact two-dimensional analytic wave functions for an arbitrary number $N$ of contact-interacting lowest-Landau-level (LLL) spinful fermions are derived with the use of combined numerical and symbolic computational approaches via analysis of exact Hamiltonian numerical diagonalization data. Closed-form analytic expressions are presented for two families of zero-interaction-energy states at given total angular momentum and total spin $0 \leq S \leq N/2$ in the neighborhood of the $ν=1$ filling, covering the range from the maximum density droplet to the first quasihole. Our theoretical prediction…
We study the quantum phase transitions between superfluid and Mott insulator states for ultracold bosons occupying two bands of an optical lattice. The two atomic states are resonantly coupled by a single cavity mode which mediates transitions between the two bosonic particle modes via absorption or emission of a cavity photon. This coupling between the bands shifts the appearance of the Mott insulator phase towards deeper optical lattice potentials and stronger on-site interaction strength, as atomic coherence can build up via photon assisted tunneling in both bands. Varying the intra and int…
We demonstrate that an ultracold many-body bosonic ensemble confined in an one-dimensional (1D) double well potential exhibits a population imbalance between the two wells at large timescales, when the depth of the wells are modulated by a time-dependent driving force. The specific form of the driving force is shown to break spatial parity and time-reversal symmetries, which leads to such an asymptotic population imbalance (API). The value of the API can be flexibly controlled by changing the phase of the driving force and the total number of particles. While the API is highly sensitive to the…
We study zero-temperature quantum fluctuations in harmonically trapped one-dimensional interacting Bose gases, using the self-consistent multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree method. We define $phase$ $fluctuations$ from the full single-particle density matrix by the spatial decay exponent of off-diagonal long-range order. In a regime of mesoscopic particle numbers and moderate contact couplings, we derive the spatial dependence of the amplitude of phase fluctuations, determined from the {\em self-consistently} derived shape of the field operator orbitals and Fock space orbital occupatio…
The time evolution of occupation number is studied for fermionic or bosonic oscillator linearly fully coupled to several fermionic and bosonic heat baths. The influence of characteristics of thermal reservoirs of different statistics on the non-stationary population probability is analyzed at large times. Applications of the absence of equilibrium in such systems for creating a dynamic (nonstationary) memory storage are discussed.
We discuss the master equation approach to diffusive current of bosonic or fermionic carriers in one- and two-dimensional lattices. This approach is shown to reproduce all known results of the linear response theory, including the integer quantum Hall effect for fermionic carriers. The main advantage of the approach is that it allows to calculate the current beyond the linear response regime where new effects are found. In particular, we show that the Hall current can be inverted by changing orientation of the static force (electric field) relative to the primary axes of the lattice.
More than 30 years ago, Thouless introduced the concept of a topological charge pump that would enable the robust transport of charge through an adiabatic cyclic evolution of the underlying Hamiltonian. In contrast to classical transport, the transported charge was shown to be quantized and purely determined by the topology of the pump cycle, making it robust to perturbations. On a fundamental level, the quantized charge transport can be connected to a topological invariant, the Chern number, first introduced in the context of the integer quantum Hall effect. A Thouless quantum pump may theref…
Quantum simulation with ultracold atoms has become a powerful technique to gain insight into interacting many-body systems. In particular, the possibility to study nonequilibrium dynamics offers a unique pathway to understand correlations and excitations in strongly interacting quantum matter. So far, coherent nonequilibrium dynamics has exclusively been observed in ultracold many-body systems of bosonic atoms. Here we report on the observation of coherent quench dynamics of fermionic atoms. A metallic state of ultracold spin-polarised fermions is prepared along with a Bose-Einstein condensate…
The symmetrization postulate asserts that the state of particular species of particles can only be of one permutation symmetry type: symmetric for bosons and antisymmetric for fermions. We report some experimental results showing that pairs of photons indistinguishable by all degrees of freedom can exhibit not only a bosonic behavior, as expected for photons, but also a surprisingly sharp fermionic behavior under specific conditions.
We explore the correlated quantum dynamics of a single atom, regarded as an open system, with a spatio-temporally localized coupling to a finite bosonic environment. The single atom, initially prepared in a coherent state of low energy, oscillates in a one-dimensional harmonic trap and thereby periodically penetrates an interacting ensemble of $N_A$ bosons, held in a displaced trap. We show that the inter-species energy transfer accelerates with increasing $N_A$ and becomes less complete at the same time. System-environment correlations prove to be significant except for times when the excess …
All-order momentum correlation functions associated with the time-of-flight spectroscopy of three spinless ultracold bosonic interacting neutral atoms confined in a linear three-well optical trap are presented. The underlying Hamiltonian employed for the interacting atoms is an augmented three-site Hubbard model. Our investigations target matter-wave interference of massive particles, aiming at the establishment of experimental protocols for characterizing the quantum states of trapped attractively or repulsively interacting ultracold particles, with variable interaction strength. The manifest…
We present novel approaches to the dynamics of an open quantum system coupled linearly to a non-Markovian fermionic or bosonic environment. In the first approach, we obtain a hierarchy of stochastic evolution equations of the diffusion type. For the bosonic case such a hierarchy has been derived and proven suitable for efficient numerical simulations recently [arXiv:1402.4647]. The stochastic fermionic hierarchy derived here contains Grassmannian noise, which makes it difficult to simulate numerically due to its anti-commutative multiplication. Therefore, in our second approach we eliminate th…
We show how to achieve perfect quantum state transfer and construct effective two-qubit gates between distant sites in engineered bosonic and fermionic networks. The Hamiltonian for the system can be determined by choosing an eigenvalue spectrum satisfying a certain condition, which is shown to be both sufficient and necessary in mirror-symmetrical networks. The natures of the effective two-qubit gates depend on the exchange symmetry for fermions and bosons. For fermionic networks, the gates are entangling (and thus universal for quantum computation). For bosonic networks, though the gates are…
We discuss the theory of mixtures of Bosonic and Fermionic atoms in periodic potentials at zero temperature. We derive a general Bose--Fermi Hubbard Hamiltonian in a one--dimensional optical lattice with a superimposed harmonic trapping potential. We study the conditions for linear stability of the mixture and derive a mean field criterion for the onset of a Bosonic superfluid transition. We investigate the ground state properties of the mixture in the Gutzwiller formulation of mean field theory, and present numerical studies of finite systems. The Bosonic and Fermionic density distributions a…
We introduce the bosonic and fermionic ensembles of density matrices and study their entanglement. In the fermionic case, we show that random bipartite fermionic density matrices have non-positive partial transposition, hence they are typically entangled. The similar analysis in the bosonic case is more delicate, due to a large positive outlier eigenvalue. We compute the asymptotic ratio between the size of the environment and the size of the system Hilbert space for which random bipartite bosonic density matrices fail the PPT criterion, being thus entangled. We also relate moment computations…
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 …
In this paper we provide a novel and general way to construct the result of the action of any bosonic or fermionic operator represented in second quantized form on a state vector, without resorting to the matrix representation of operators and even to its elements. The new approach is based on our proposal to compactly enumerate the configurations (i.e., determinants for fermions, permanents for bosons) which are the elements of the state vector. This extremely simplifies the calculation of the action of an operator on a state vector. The computations of statical properties and of the evolutio…
We analyze the efficiency of quantum simulations of fermionic and bosonic models in trapped ions. In particular, we study the optimal time of entangling gates and the required number of total elementary gates. Furthermore, we exemplify these estimations in the light of quantum simulations of quantum field theories, condensed-matter physics, and quantum chemistry. Finally, we show that trapped-ion technologies are a suitable platform for implementing quantum simulations involving interacting fermionic and bosonic modes, paving the way for overcoming classical computers in the near future.
We describe the gas of ultracold fermionic atoms by a functional integral for atom and molecule fields. The crossover from Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) to BCS-type superfluidity shows universal features in terms of a concentration parameter for the ratio between scattering length and average interatomic distance. We discuss the relevance of the Yukawa coupling between atoms and molecules, establish an exact narrow resonance limit and show that renormalized quantities are independent of the Yukawa coupling for the broad resonance, BCS and BEC limits. Within our functional integral formalism…
We present a hierarchical equations of motion approach, which allows a numerically exact simulation of nonequilibrium transport in general open quantum systems involving multiple macroscopic bosonic and fermionic environments. The performance of the method is demonstrated for a model of a nanosystem, which involves interacting electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom and is coupled to fermionic and bosonic baths. The results show the intricate interplay of electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom in this nonequilibrium transport scenario for both voltage and thermally driven transpor…
The projective construction (the slave-particle approach) has played an very important role in understanding strongly correlated systems, such as the emergence of fermions, anyons, and gauge theory in quantum spin liquids and quantum Hall states. Recently, fermionic Projected Entangled Pair States (fPEPS) have been introduced to effciently represent many-body fermionic states. In this paper, we show that the strongly correlated bosonic/fermionic states obtained both from the projective construction and the fPEPS approach can be represented systematically as Grassmann tensor product states. Thi…
It is shown that a similar functional form $S=a+b\ln N$ holds approximately for the information entropy S as function of the number of particles N for atoms, nuclei and atomic clusters (fermionic systems) and correlated boson-atoms in a trap (bosonic systems). It is also seen that rigorous inequalities previously found to hold between S and the kinetic energy T for fermionic systems, hold for bosonic systems as well. It is found that Landsberg's order parameter $Ω$ is an increasing function of N for the above systems. It is conjectured that the above properties are universal i.e. they do not d…
We study the tunneling dynamics of bosonic and fermionic Tonks-Girardeau gases from a hard wall trap, in which one of the walls is substituted by a delta potential. Using the Fermi-Bose map, the decay of the probability to remain in the trap is studied as a function of both the number of particles and the intensity of the end-cap delta laser. The fermionic gas is shown to be a good candidate to study deviations of the non-exponential decay of the single-particle type, whereas for the bosonic case a novel regime of non-exponential decay appears due to the contributions of different resonances o…
Engineering non-Markovianity from spectral shaping of bosonic and fermionic baths
Fudan University（复旦大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Hefei National Laboratory（合肥国家实验室）；University of California San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）
We report on the theoretical analysis of bosonic and fermionic non-interacting systems in a discrete two-particle quantum walk affected by different kinds of disorder. We considered up to 100-step QWs with a spatial, temporal and space-temporal disorder observing how the randomness and the wavefunction symmetry non-trivially affect the final spatial probability distribution, the transport properties and the Shannon entropy of the walkers.
Apparent Fermionic Spectra for Bosonic Radiation: Accelerated Charge Kinematics
Nazarbayev University（纳扎尔巴耶夫大学）；National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；Spectrum International School（斯佩克特国际学校）
We relate the reduced density matrices of quadratic bosonic and fermionic models to their Green's function matrices in a unified way and calculate the scaling of bipartite entanglement of finite systems in an infinite universe exactly. For critical fermionic 2D systems at T=0, two regimes of scaling are identified: generically, we find a logarithmic correction to the area law with a prefactor dependence on the chemical potential that confirms earlier predictions based on the Widom conjecture. If, however, the Fermi surface of the critical system is zero-dimensional, we find an area law with a …
Wick's theorem provides a connection between time ordered products of bosonic or fermionic fields, and their normal ordered counterparts. We consider a generic pair of operator orderings and we prove, by induction, the theorem that relates them. We name this the General Wick's Theorem (GWT) because it carries Wick's theorem as special instance, when one applies the GWT to time and normal orderings. We establish the GWT both for bosonic and fermionic operators, i.e. operators that satisfy c-number commutation and anticommutation relations respectively. We remarkably show that the GWT is the sam…
We have constructed a unified framework for generalizing the finite-time thermodynamic behavior of statistically distinct bosonic and fermionic Stirling cycles with regenerative characteristics. In our formalism, working fluid consisting of particles obeying Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein statistics are treated under equal footing and modelled as a collection of non-interacting harmonic and fermionic oscillators. In terms of frequency and population of the two oscillators, we have provided an interesting generalization for the definitions of heat and work that are valid for classical as well as…
We disclose the behaviour of quantum and classical correlations among all the different spatial-temporal regions of a space-time with an event horizon, comparing fermionic with bosonic fields. We show the emergence of conservation laws for entanglement and classical correlations, pointing out the crucial role that statistics plays in the information exchange (and more specifically, the entanglement tradeoff) across horizons. The results obtained here could shed new light on the problem of information behaviour in non-inertial frames and in the presence of horizons, giving a better insight abou…
We show that ultracold atoms can be controlled in multi-band optical lattices through spatially periodic Raman pulses for investigation of a class of strongly correlated physics related to the Kondo problem. The underlying dynamics of this system is described by a spin-dependent fermionic or bosonic Kondo-Hubbard lattice model even if we have only spin-independent atomic collision interaction. We solve the bosonic Kondo-Hubbard lattice model through a mean-field approximation, and the result shows a clear phase transition from the ferromagnetic superfluid to the Kondo-signet insulator at the i…
