Square lattice Hubbard models with tunable hopping ratio $t'/t$ are highly promising for realizing a variety of quantum phases and for shedding light on key puzzles in correlated quantum materials, including higher-temperature superconductivity. We show that twisted square lattice homo-bilayers generically offer such tunability when the flat bands originate from the corner of the Brillouin zone. We reveal an emergent symmetry at low twist-angles, absent in single layers, that necessitates the vanishing of nearest neighbor hopping ($t=0$). This symmetry can be lifted by an inter-layer displacement field or by an in-plane magnetic field, introducing tunable $t$ and anisotropy, allowing access to a wide range of $t'/t$ ratios for correlated electrons on a moiré square lattice.
Quantum Phases in Twisted Homobilayer Transition Metal Dichalcogenides
School of Physics and Technology, Wuhan University（武汉大学物理科学与技术学院）；Wuhan Institute of Quantum Technology（武汉量子技术研究院）；Department of Physics, University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校物理系）
We propose a realization of Kondo-lattice physics in moiré superlattices at the interface between a WX$_2$ homobilayer and MoX$_2$ monolayer (where X=S,Se). Under appropriate gating conditions, the interface-WX$_2$-layer forms a triangular lattice of local moments that couple to itinerant electrons in the other WX$_2$-layer via a gate-tunable Kondo exchange interaction. Using a parton mean-field approach we identify a range of twist-angles which support a gate-tuned quantum phase transition between a heavy-fermion liquid with large anomalous Hall conductance and a fractionalized chiral spin-li…
Twisted transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) homobilayers have recently emerged as a powerful platform for studying correlated insulating states. In the strongly correlated limit, we construct an effective spin Hamiltonian on a honeycomb lattice that includes the Heisenberg interaction and nonsymmetric interactions such as a Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction and a Kane-Mele coupling for the Mott-insulating phase at half-filling. For the twisted TMD homobilayers, the spin-orbit coupling in the Hubbard model, which is expected to induce the antisymmetric exchange couplings in the effective spin…
The moiré Hubbard model describes correlations in certain homobilayer twisted transition metal dichalcogenides. Using exact diagonalization and density matrix renormalization group methods, we find magnetic Mott insulating and metallic phases, which, upon doping exhibit intertwined charge and spin ordering and, in some regimes, pair binding of holes. The phases are highly tunable via an interlayer potential difference. Remarkably, the hole binding energy is found to be highly tunable revealing an experimentally accessible regime where holes become attractive. In this attractive regime, we stud…
Mott-Hubbard and Hund electron correlations have been realized thus far in separate classes of materials. Here, we show that a single moiré homobilayer encompasses both kinds of physics in a controllable manner. We develop a microscopic multiband model that we solve by dynamical mean-field theory to nonperturbatively address the local many-body correlations. We demonstrate how tuning with twist angle, dielectric screening, and hole density allows us to switch between Mott-Hubbard and Hund correlated states in a twisted WSe$_2$ bilayer. The underlying mechanism is based on controlling Coulomb-i…
Moire superlattices of transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) bilayers have been shown to host correlated electronic states, which arises from the interplay of emergent moire potential and long-range Coulomb interactions. Here we theoretically investigate structural relaxation and single-particle electronic properties in moire superlattices of transition metal dichalcogenide homobilayer and study the ground state charge orders in the effective honeycomb lattice of MX and XM region. From the large-scale density functional theory calculation and continuum model with layer degrees of freedom, we f…
We study the effects of a periodically varying electric field on the Hubbard model at half-filling on a triangular lattice. The electric field is incorporated through the phase of the nearest-neighbor hopping amplitude via the Peierls prescription. When the on-site interaction $U$ is much larger than the hopping, the effective Hamiltonian $H_{eff}$ describing the spin sector can be found using a Floquet perturbation theory. To third order in the hopping, $H_{eff}$ is found to have the form of a Heisenberg antiferromagnet with three different nearest-neighbor couplings $(J_α,J_β,J_γ)$ on bonds …
We investigate electron transport through a diatomic molecule parallelly coupled to infinite source and drain contacts. We utilize a model Hamiltonian involving a Hubbard term in which the contacts are modeled using recently developed complex source and sink potentials. The zero bias transmission spectrum for a symmetrically coupled system as a function of the Fermi energy acquires a Fano lineshape as the Hubbard interaction is turned on. For large values of $U$, the Fano lineshape broadens and shifts to higher energy values disappearing eventually. Meanwhile, the Breit-Wigner resonance locate…
We employ a recently developed computational many-body technique to study for the first time the half-filled Anderson-Hubbard model at finite temperature and arbitrary correlation ($U$) and disorder ($V$) strengths. Interestingly, the narrow zero temperature metallic range induced by disorder from the Mott insulator expands with increasing temperature in a manner resembling a quantum critical point. Our study of the resistivity temperature scaling $T^α$ for this metal reveals non Fermi liquid characteristics. Moreover, a continuous dependence of $α$ on $U$ and $V$ from linear to nearly quadrat…
Moiré materials with flat electronic bands provide a highly controllable quantum system for studies of strong-correlation physics and topology. In particular, angle-aligned heterobilayers of semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) with large band offset realize the single-band Hubbard models. Introduction of a new layer degree of freedom is expected to foster richer interactions, enabling Hund's physics, interlayer exciton condensation and new superconducting pairing mechanisms to name a few. Here, we report competing electronic orders in twisted AB-homobilayer WSe2, which reali…
Electrons in artificial lattices enable explorations of the impact of repulsive Coulomb interactions in a tunable system. We have trapped two-dimensional electrons belonging to a gallium arsenide quantum well in a nanofabricated lattice with honeycomb geometry. We probe the excitation spectrum in a magnetic field identifying novel collective modes that emerge from the Coulomb interaction in the artificial lattice as predicted by the Mott-Hubbard model. These observations allow us to determine the Hubbard gap and suggest the existence of a novel Coulomb-driven ground state. This approach offers…
In this paper, we derive lattice models for the narrow moiré bands of the AB-stacked twisted WSe$_2$ homobilayer through continuum model and Wannier orbital construction. Previous work has shown that an approximate SU(4) Hubbard model may be realized by combining spin and layer because inter-layer tunneling is suppressed due to spin $S_z$ conservation. However, Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC) was ignored in the previous analysis. Here, we show that a Rashba SOC of reasonable magnitude can induce a finite but very small inter-layer hopping in the final lattice Hubbard model. At total filling $…
Understanding the mechanism of high temperature (high Tc) superconductivity is a central problem in condensed matter physics. It is often speculated that high Tc superconductivity arises from a doped Mott insulator as described by the Hubbard model. An exact solution of the Hubbard model, however, is extremely challenging due to the strong electron-electron correlation. Therefore, it is highly desirable to experimentally study a model Hubbard system in which the unconventional superconductivity can be continuously tuned by varying the Hubbard parameters. Here we report signatures of tunable su…
The interplay of charge, spin, lattice, and orbital degrees of freedom leads to a wide range of emergent phenomena in strongly correlated systems. In heterobilayer transition metal dichalcogenide moiré systems, recent observations of Mott insulators and generalized Wigner crystals are well described by triangular lattice single-orbital Hubbard models based on K-valley derived moiré bands. Richer phase diagrams, mapped onto multi-orbital Hubbard models, are possible with hexagonal lattices in $Γ$-valley derived moiré bands and additional layer degrees of freedom. Here we report the tunable inte…
Twisted bilayer transition metal dichalcogenides have emerged as important model systems for the investigation of correlated electron physics because their interaction strength, carrier concentration, band structure, and inversion symmetry breaking are controllable by device fabrication, twist angle, and most importantly, gate voltage, which can be varied in situ. The low energy physics of some of these materials has been shown to be described by a "moiré Hubbard model" generalized from the usual Hubbard model by the addition of strong, tunable spin orbit coupling and inversion symmetry breaki…
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,…
The long wavelength moiré superlattices in twisted 2D structures have emerged as a highly tunable platform for strongly correlated electron physics. We study the moiré bands in twisted transition metal dichalcogenide homobilayers, focusing on WSe$_2$, at small twist angles using a combination of first principles density functional theory, continuum modeling, and Hartree-Fock approximation. We reveal the rich physics at small twist angles $θ<4^\circ$, and identify a particular magic angle at which the top valence moiré band achieves almost perfect flatness. In the vicinity of this magic angle, …
We present a theoretical study of single-particle and many-body properties of twisted bilayer WSe$_2$. For single-particle physics, we calculate the band topological phase diagram and electron local density of states (LDOS), which are found to be correlated. By comparing our theoretical LDOS with those measured by scanning tunneling microscopy, we comment on the possible topological nature of the first moiré valence band. For many-body physics, we construct a generalized Hubbard model on a triangular lattice based on the calculated single-particle moiré bands. We show that a layer potential di…
We theoretically study the correlated insulator states, quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) states, and field-induced topological transitions between different correlated states in twisted multilayer graphene systems. Taking twisted bilayer-monolayer graphene and twisted double-bilayer graphene as examples, we show that both systems stay in spin polarized, $C_{3z}$-broken insulator states with zero Chern number at 1/2 filling of the flat bands under finite displacement fields. In some cases these spin polarized, nematic insulator states are in the quantum valley Hall phase by virtue of the nontrivial…
In strongly correlated electron systems the constraint which prohibits the double electron occupation at local sites can be realized by either the infinite Coulomb interaction or the correlated hopping interaction described by the Hubbard operators, but they both render the conventional field theory inapplicable. Relaxing such the constraint leads to a class of correlated hopping models based on the deformed Hubbard operators which smoothly interpolate the locally free and strong coupling limits by a tunable interaction parameter $0\leq λ\leq 1$. Here we propose a coherent state path integral …
We report a large-scale density-matrix renormalization group study of the lightly doped Hubbard model on 4-leg cylinders at hole doping concentration $δ=12.5\%$. By keeping a large number of states for long system sizes, we are able to reveal a delicate interplay between superconductivity and charge and spin density wave orders tunable via next-nearest neighbor hopping t'. For finite t', the ground state is consistent with that of a Luther-Emery liquid, having `half-filled' charge stripes with power-law superconducting and charge-density-wave correlations of wave-length $λ=1/2δ$, but short-ran…
Tunable Interlayer Charge-transfer States in MoSe$_2$/WS$_2$ Moiré Superlattices
University of California at Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory（劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；National Institute for Materials Science（物质材料研究机构）
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 …
Recently, it has become possible to tune optical lattices continuously between square and triangular geometries. We compute thermodynamics and spin correlations in the corresponding Hubbard model using determinant quantum Monte Carlo and show that the frustration effects induced by the variable hopping terms can be clearly separated from concomitant bandwidth changes by a proper rescaling of the interaction. An enhancement of the double occupancy by geometric frustration signals the destruction of nontrivial antiferromagnetic correlations at weak coupling and entropy $s\lesssim \ln(2)$ (and re…
Localized defects, unavoidable in real solids, may be simulated in (generically defect-free) cold-atom systems, e.g., via modifications of the optical lattice. We study the Hubbard model on a square lattice with single impurities, pairs of nearby impurities, or lines of impurities using numerically exact determinantal quantum Monte Carlo simulations. In all cases, correlations on the "impurity" sites are enhanced either by larger on-site interactions or by a reduced coupling to the environment. We find highly nontrivial magnetic correlations, which persist at elevated temperatures and should b…
Bilayer Moiré structures are a highly tunable laboratory to investigate the physics of strongly correlated electron systems. Moiré transition metal dichalcogenides at low-energies, in particular, are believed to be described by a single narrow band Hubbard model on a triangular lattice with spin-orbit coupling. Motivated by recent experimental evidence for superconductivity in twisted bilayer materials, we investigate the possible superconducting pairings in a two-dimensional single band Rashba-Hubbard model. Using a random-phase approximation in the presence of nearest and next-nearest neighb…
Mott insulator plays a central role in strongly correlated physics, where the repulsive Coulomb interaction dominates over the electron kinetic energy and leads to insulating states with one electron occupying each unit cell. Doped Mott insulator is often described by the Hubbard model3, which can give rise to other correlated phenomena such as unusual magnetism and even high-temperature superconductivity. A tunable Mott insulator, where the competition between the Coulomb interaction and the kinetic energy can be varied in situ, can provide an invaluable model system for the study of Mott phy…
Recent studies of electrical transport, both theoretical and experimental, near the bandwidth-tuned Mott metal-insulator transition have uncovered apparent quantum critical scaling of the electrical resistivity at elevated temperatures, despite the fact that the actual low-temperature phase transition is of first order. This raises the question whether there is a hidden Mott quantum critical point. Here we argue that the dynamical mean-field theory of the Hubbard model admits, in the low-temperature limit, asymptotically scale-invariant (i.e. power-law) solutions, corresponding to the metastab…
We model a quantum dot-array (with one electron per dot) comprising of two (or more than two) coupled dots by an extended Hubbard Hamiltonian to investigate the role played by the inter-dot tunneling amplitude td, together with intra-dot (U) and inter-dot(U1) coulomb repulsions, in the singlet / triplet bound state formation and evolution of the system from the Mott-insulator-like state to a correlated semi-metallic state via charge-bond-order route. In the presence of magnetic field, td is complex due to the appearance of Peierls phase factor. We introduce a short-ranged inter-dot capacitive …
We introduce a scheme that combines photon-assisted tunneling by a moving optical lattice with strong Hubbard interactions, and allows for the quantum simulation of paradigmatic quantum many-body models. We show that, in a certain regime, this quantum simulator yields an effective Hubbard Hamiltonian with tunable bond-charge interactions, a model studied in the context of strongly-correlated electrons. In a different regime, we show how to exploit a correlated destruction of tunneling to explore Nagaoka ferromagnetism at finite Hubbard repulsion. By changing the photon-assisted tunneling param…
Moiré in $Γ$-valley square lattice: Copper- and iron-based superconductor simulation in a single device
International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (WPI-MANA), National Institute for Materials Science（物质纳米结构国际中心（WPI-MANA），国立材料研究所）；Department of Physics, Harvard University（哈佛大学物理系）；Department of Physics, University of Connecticut（康涅狄格大学物理系）；School of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院物理学院）
Probing Quantum Anomalous Hall States in Twisted Bilayer WSe2 via Attractive Polaron Spectroscopy
Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), University of Maryland（马里兰大学联合量子研究所）；Electrical Engineering Department, University of Maryland（马里兰大学电气工程系）；Center for Functional Nanomaterials, Brookhaven National Laboratory（布鲁克海文国家实验室功能纳米材料中心）
We report on the observation of anti-ferromagnetic correlations of ultracold fermions in a variety of optical lattice geometries that are well described by the Hubbard model, including dimers, 1D chains, ladders, isolated and coupled honeycomb planes, as well as square and cubic lattices. The dependence of the strength of spin correlations on the specific geometry is experimentally studied by measuring the correlations along different lattice tunneling links, where a redistribution of correlations between the different lattice links is observed. By measuring the correlations in a crossover bet…
Engineering tunable $p$-wave magnetism in antiferromagnetic bilayers
College of Mathematics and Physics, Ningde Normal University（宁德师范学院数学与物理学院）；Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院理论物理研究所）；Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Condensed Matter Physics at Extreme Conditions, High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院合肥物质科学研究院强磁场科学中心凝聚态物理极端条件安徽省重点实验室）；Department of Physics, Boston College（波士顿学院物理系）；School of Physical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学物理科学学院）
We study the phase diagram of the Bose-Hubbard model on the kagome lattice with a broken sublattice symmetry. Such a superlattice structure can naturally be created and tuned by changing the potential offset of one sublattice in the optical generation of the frustrated lattice. The superstructure gives rise to a rich quantum phase diagram, which is analyzed by combining Quantum Monte Carlo simulations with the Generalized Effective Potential Landau Theory. Mott phases with non-integer filling and a characteristic order along stripes are found, which show a transition to a superfluid phase with…
We describe a quantum simulator for the Hubbard--Holstein model (HHM), comprising two dressed Rydberg atom species held in a monolayer by independent painted potentials, predicting that boson-mediated preformed pairing, and Berezinskii--Kosterlitz--Thouless (BKT) transition temperatures are experimentally accessible. The HHM is important for modeling the essential physics of unconventional superconductors. Experimentally realizable quantum simulators for HHMs are needed: (1) since HHMs are difficult to solve numerically and analytically, (2) to explore how competition between electron-phonon i…
Tuning superconducting pairing symmetry via a staggered potential in the doped honeycomb Hubbard model
School of Physics and Astronomy, Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学物理学院）；Key Laboratory of Multiscale Spin Physics (Beijing Normal University), Ministry of Education（教育部多尺度自旋物理重点实验室（北京师范大学））；College of Physics, Hebei Normal University（河北师范大学物理学院）；Hebei Advanced Thin Films Laboratory（河北省先进薄膜实验室）
