No Arabic abstract
Ultracold fermionic alkaline earth atoms confined in optical lattices realize Hubbard models with internal SU(N) symmetries, where N can be as large as ten. Such systems are expected to harbor exotic magnetic physics at temperatures below the superexchange energy scale. Employing quantum Monte Carlo simulations to access the low-temperature regime, we show that after adiabatically loading a weakly interacting gas into the strongly interacting regime of an optical lattice, the final temperature decreases with increasing N. Furthermore, we estimate the temperature scale required to probe correlations associated with low-temperature SU(N) magnetism. Our findings are encouraging for the exploration of exotic large-N magnetic states in ongoing experiments.
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.
We calculate the collective modes of ultracold trapped alkaline-earth fermionic atoms, which possess an SU($N$) symmetry of the nuclear spin degree of freedom, and a controllable $N$, with $N$ as large as $10$. We calculate the breathing and quadrupole modes of two-dimensional and three-dimensional harmonically trapped gases in the normal phase. We particularly concentrate on two-dimensional gases, where the shift is more accessible experimentally, and the physics has special features. We present results as a function of temperature, interaction strength, density, and $N$. We include calculations across the collisionless to hydrodynamic crossover. We assume the gas is interacting weakly, such that it can be described by a Boltzmann-Vlasov equation that includes both mean-field terms and the collision integral. We solve this with an approximate scaling ansatz, taking care in two-dimensions to preserve the scaling symmetry of the system. We predict the collective mode frequency shifts and damping, showing that these are measurable in experimentally relevant regimes. We expect these results to furnish powerful tools to characterize interactions and the state of alkaline-earth gases, as well as to lay the foundation for future work, for example on strongly interacting gases and SU($N$) spin modes.
We demonstrate single-shot imaging and narrow-line cooling of individual alkaline earth atoms in optical tweezers; specifically, strontium-88 atoms trapped in $515.2~text{nm}$ light. We achieve high-fidelity single-atom-resolved imaging by detecting photons from the broad singlet transition while cooling on the narrow intercombination line, and extend this technique to highly uniform two-dimensional arrays of $121$ tweezers. Cooling during imaging is based on a previously unobserved narrow-line Sisyphus mechanism, which we predict to be applicable in a wide variety of experimental situations. Further, we demonstrate optically resolved sideband cooling of a single atom close to the motional ground state of a tweezer. Precise determination of losses during imaging indicate that the branching ratio from $^1$P$_1$ to $^1$D$_2$ is more than a factor of two larger than commonly quoted, a discrepancy also predicted by our ab initio calculations. We also measure the differential polarizability of the intercombination line in a $515.2~text{nm}$ tweezer and achieve a magic-trapping configuration by tuning the tweezer polarization from linear to elliptical. We present calculations, in agreement with our results, which predict a magic crossing for linear polarization at $520(2)~text{nm}$ and a crossing independent of polarization at 500.65(50)nm. Our results pave the way for a wide range of novel experimental avenues based on individually controlled alkaline earth atoms in tweezers -- from fundamental experiments in atomic physics to quantum computing, simulation, and metrology implementations.
We experimentally realize Rydberg excitations in Bose-Einstein condensates of rubidium atoms loaded into quasi one-dimensional traps and in optical lattices. Our results for condensates expanded to different sizes in the one-dimensional trap agree well with the intuitive picture of a chain of Rydberg excitations. We also find that the Rydberg excitations in the optical lattice do not destroy the phase coherence of the condensate, and our results in that system agree with the picture of localized collective Rydberg excitations including nearest-neighbour blockade.
Blurring the boundary between bosons and fermions lies at the heart of a wide range of intriguing quantum phenomena in multiple disciplines, ranging from condensed matter physics and atomic, molecular and optical physics to high energy physics. One such example is a multi-component Fermi gas with SU($N$) symmetry that is expected to behave like spinless bosons in the large $N$ limit, where the large number of internal states weakens constraints from the Pauli exclusion principle. However, bosonization in SU($N$) fermions has never been established in high dimensions where exact solutions are absent. Here, we report direct evidence for bosonization in a SU($N$) fermionic ytterbium gas with tunable $N$ in three dimensions (3D). We measure contacts, the central quantity controlling dilute quantum gases, from the momentum distribution, and find that the contact per spin approaches a constant with a 1/$N$ scaling in the low fugacity regime consistent with our theoretical prediction. This scaling signifies the vanishing role of the fermionic statistics in thermodynamics, and allows us to verify bosonization through measuring a single physical quantity. Our work delivers a highly controllable quantum simulator to exchange the bosonic and fermionic statistics through tuning the internal degrees of freedom in any generic dimensions. It also suggests a new route towards exploring multi-component quantum systems and their underlying symmetries with contacts.