We consider a mixture of two bosonic species with tunable interspecies interaction in a periodic potential and discuss the advantages of low filling factors on the detection of the pair-superfluid phase. We show how the emergence of such a phase can be put dramatically into evidence by looking at the interference pictures and density correlations after expansion and by changing the interspecies interaction from attractive to repulsive.
We report the observation of many-body interaction effects for a homonuclear bosonic mixture in a three-dimensional optical lattice with variable state dependence along one axis. Near the superfluid-to-Mott insulator transition for one component, we find that the presence of a second component can reduce the apparent superfluid coherence, most significantly when it either experiences a strongly localizing lattice potential or none at all. We examine this effect by varying the relative populations and lattice depths, and discuss the observed behavior in view of recent proposals for scattering from impurities and of atom-phonon coupling for atoms immersed in a superfluid.
Motivated by recent experiments and theoretical investigations on binary mixtures, we investigate the miscible-immiscible transition at finite temperature by means of Quantum Monte Carlo. Based on the observation that the segregated phase is strongly affected by temperature, we propose to use the degree of demixing for thermometry of a binary bosonic mixture trapped in an optical lattice. We show that the proposed method is especially sensitive at low temperatures, of the order of the tunnelling amplitude, and therefore is particularly suitable in the regime where quantum magnetism is expected.
We propose a model for addressing the superfluidity of two different Fermi species confined in a bilayer geometry of square optical lattices. The fermions are assumed to be molecules with interlayer s-wave interactions, whose dipole moments are oriented perpendicularly to the layers. Using functional integral techniques we investigate the BCS-like state induced in the bilayer at finite temperatures. In particular, we determine the critical temperature as a function of the coupling strength between molecules in different layers and of the interlayer spacing. By means of Ginzburg-Landau theory we calculate the superfluid density. We also study the dimerized BEC phase through the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition, where the effective mass leads to identify the crossover from BCS to BEC regimes. The possibility of tuning the effective mass as a direct consequence of the lattice confinement, allows us to suggest a range of values of the interlayer spacing, which would enable observing this superfluidity within current experimental conditions.
Topological superfluids are of technological relevance since they are believed to host Majorana bound states, a powerful resource for quantum computation and memory. Here we propose to realize topological superfluidity with fermionic atoms in an optical lattice. We consider a situation where atoms in two internal states experience different lattice potentials: one species is localized and the other itinerant, and show how quantum fluctuations of the localized fermions give rise to an attraction and strong spin-orbit coupling in the itinerant band. At low temperature, these effects stabilize a topological superfluid of mobile atoms even if their bare interactions are repulsive. This emergent state can be engineered with ${}^{87}$Sr atoms in a superlattice with a dimerized unit cell. To probe its unique properties we describe protocols that use high spectral resolution and controllability of the Sr clock transition, such as momentum-resolved spectroscopy and supercurrent response to a synthetic (laser-induced) magnetic field.
At low temperatures bosons typically condense to minimize their single-particle kinetic energy while interactions stabilize superfluidity. Optical lattices with artificial spin-orbit coupling challenge this paradigm because here kinetic energy can be quenched in an extreme regime where the single-particle band flattens. To probe the fate of superfluidity in the absence of kinetics we construct and numerically solve interaction-only tight-binding models in flat bands. We find that novel superfluid states arise entirely from interactions operating in quenched kinetic energy bands, thus revealing a distinct and unexpected condensation mechanism. Our results have important implications for the identification of quantum condensed phases of ultracold bosons beyond conventional paradigms.