No Arabic abstract
The interplay between magnetism and doping is at the origin of exotic strongly correlated electronic phases and can lead to novel forms of magnetic ordering. One example is the emergence of incommensurate spin-density waves with a wave vector that does not match the reciprocal lattice. In one dimension this effect is a hallmark of Luttinger liquid theory, which also describes the low energy physics of the Hubbard model. Here we use a quantum simulator based on ultracold fermions in an optical lattice to directly observe such incommensurate spin correlations in doped and spin-imbalanced Hubbard chains using fully spin and density resolved quantum gas microscopy. Doping is found to induce a linear change of the spin-density wave vector in excellent agreement with Luttinger theory predictions. For non-zero polarization we observe a decrease of the wave vector with magnetization as expected from the Heisenberg model in a magnetic field. We trace the microscopic origin of these incommensurate correlations to holes, doublons and excess spins which act as delocalized domain walls for the antiferromagnetic order. Finally, when inducing interchain coupling we observe fundamentally different spin correlations around doublons indicating the formation of a magnetic polaron.
Elementary particles such as the electron carry several quantum numbers, for example, charge and spin. However, in an ensemble of strongly interacting particles, the emerging degrees of freedom can fundamentally differ from those of the individual constituents. Paradigmatic examples of this phenomenon are one-dimensional systems described by independent quasiparticles carrying either spin (spinon) or charge (holon). Here we report on the dynamical deconfinement of spin and charge excitations in real space following the removal of a particle in Fermi-Hubbard chains of ultracold atoms. Using space- and time-resolved quantum gas microscopy, we track the evolution of the excitations through their signatures in spin and charge correlations. By evaluating multi-point correlators, we quantify the spatial separation of the excitations in the context of fractionalization into single spinons and holons at finite temperatures.
Open many-body quantum systems have recently gained renewed interest in the context of quantum information science and quantum transport with biological clusters and ultracold atomic gases. A series of results in diverse setups is presented, based on a Master equation approach to describe the dissipative dynamics of ultracold bosons in a one-dimensional lattice. The creation of mesoscopic stable many-body structures in the lattice is predicted and the non-equilibrium transport of neutral atoms in the regime of strong and weak interactions is studied.
Quantum many-body systems may defy thermalization even without disorder. Intriguingly, non-ergodicity may be caused by a fragmentation of the many-body Hilbert-space into dynamically disconnected subspaces. The tilted one-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model was proposed as a platform to realize fragmented models perturbatively in the limit of large tilt. Here, we demonstrate the validity of this effective description for the transient dynamics using ultracold fermions. The effective analytic model allows for a detailed understanding of the emergent microscopic processes, which in our case exhibit a pronounced doublon-number dependence. We study this experimentally by tuning the doublon fraction in the initial state.
We study ergodicity breaking in the clean Bose-Hubbard chain for small hopping strength. We see the existence of a non-ergodic regime by means of indicators as the half-chain entanglement entropy of the eigenstates, the average level spacing ratio, {the properties of the eigenstate-expectation distribution of the correlation and the scaling of the Inverse Participation Ratio averages.} We find that this ergodicity breaking {is different from many-body localization} because the average half-chain entanglement entropy of the eigenstates obeys volume law. This ergodicity breaking appears unrelated to the spectrum being organized in quasidegenerate multiplets at small hopping and finite system sizes, so in principle it can survive also for larger system sizes. We find that some imbalance oscillations in time which could mark the existence of a glassy behaviour in space are well described by the dynamics of a single symmetry-breaking doublet and {quantitatively} captured by a perturbative effective XXZ model. We show that the amplitude of these oscillations vanishes in the large-size limit. {Our findings are numerically obtained for systems with $L < 12$. Extrapolations of our scalings to larger system sizes should be taken with care, as discussed in the paper.
The realization of antiferromagnetic (AF) correlations in ultracold fermionic atoms on an optical lattice is a significant achievement. Experiments have been carried out in one, two, and three dimensions, and have also studied anisotropic configurations with stronger tunneling in some lattice directions. Such anisotropy is relevant to the physics of cuprate superconductors and other strongly correlated materials. Moreover, this anisotropy might be harnessed to enhance AF order. Here we numerically investigate, using Determinant Quantum Monte Carlo, a simple realization of anisotropy in the 3D Hubbard model in which the tunneling between planes, $t_perp$, is unequal to the intraplane tunneling $t$. This model interpolates between the three-dimensional isotropic ($t_perp = t$) and two-dimensional ($t_perp =0$) systems. We show that at fixed interaction strength to tunneling ratio ($U/t$), anisotropy can enhance the magnetic structure factor relative to both 2D and 3D results. However, this enhancement occurs at interaction strengths below those for which the Neel temperature $T_{rm Nacute{e}el}$ is largest, in such a way that the structure factor cannot be made to exceed its value in isotropic 3D systems at the optimal $U/t$. We characterize the 2D-3D crossover in terms of the magnetic structure factor, real space spin correlations, number of doubly-occupied sites, and thermodynamic observables. An interesting implication of our results stems from the entropys dependence on anisotropy. As the system evolves from 3D to 2D, the entropy at a fixed temperature increases. Correspondingly, at fixed entropy, the temperature will decrease going from 3D to 2D. This suggests a cooling protocol in which the dimensionality is adiabatically changed from 3D to 2D.