We investigate the interaction-driven instability of a quadratic band crossing arising for ultracold bosonic atoms loaded into a two-dimensional optical lattice. We consider the case when the degenerate point becomes a local minimum of both crossing energy bands such that it can support a stable Bose-Einstein condensate. Repulsive contact interaction among the condensed bosons induces a spontaneously time-reversal symmetry broken superfluid phase and a topological gap is opened in the excitation spectrum. We propose two concrete realizations of the desired quadratic band crossing in lattices with either fourfold or sixfold rotational symmetries via suitable tuning of the unit cell leading to reduced Brillouin zones and correspondingly folded bands. In either case, topologically protected edge excitations are found for a finite system.
We study the topological properties of elementary excitations in a staggered $p_x pm i p_y$ Bose-Einstein condensate realized in recent orbital optical lattice experiments. The condensate wave function may be viewed as a configuration space variant of the famous $p_x+ ip_y$ momentum space order parameter of strontium ruthenate superconductors. We show that its elementary excitation spectrum possesses Dirac bosons with $pi$ Berry flux. Remarkably, if we induce a population imbalance between the $p_x+ip_y$ and $p_x-ip_y$ condensate components, a gap opens up in the excitation spectrum resulting in a nonzero Chern invariant and topologically protected edge excitation modes. We give a detailed description on how our proposal can be implemented with standard experimental technology.
We carefully study how the fermion-fermion interactions affect the low-energy states of a two-dimensional spin-$1/2$ fermionic system on the kagom{e} lattice with a quadratic band crossing point. With the help of the renormalization group approach, we can treat all kinds of fermionic interactions on the the same footing and then establish the coupled energy-dependent flows of fermionic interaction parameters via collecting one-loop corrections, from which a number of interesting results are extracted in the low-energy regime. At first, various sorts of fermion-fermion interactions furiously compete with each other and are inevitably attracted by certain fixed point in the parameter space, which clusters into three qualitatively distinct regions relying heavily upon the structure parameters of materials. In addition, we notice that an instability accompanied by some symmetry breaking is triggered around different sorts of fixed points. Computing and comparing susceptibilities of twelve potential candidates indicates that charge density wave always dominates over all other instabilities. Incidently, there exist several subleading ones including the $x$-current, bond density, and chiral plus s-wave superconductors. Finally, we realize that strong fluctuations nearby the leading instability prefer to suppress density of states and specific heat as well compressibility of quasiparticles in the lowest-energy limit.
We investigate topological charge pumping in a system of interacting bosons in the tight-binding limit, described by the Rice-Mele model. An appropriate topological invariant for the many-body case is the change of polarization per pump cycle, which we compute for various interaction strengths from infinite-size matrix-product-state simulations. We verify that the charge pumping remains quantized as long as the pump cycle avoids the superfluid phase. In the limit of hardcore bosons, the quantized pumped charge can be understood from single-particle properties such as the integrated Berry curvature constructed from Bloch states, while this picture breaks down at finite interaction strengths. These two properties -- robust quantized charge transport in an interacting system of bosons and the breakdown of a single-particle invariant -- could both be measured with ultracold quantum gases extending a previous experiment [Lohse et al., Nature Phys. 12, 350 (2016)]. Furthermore, we investigate the entanglement spectrum of the Rice-Mele model and argue that the quantized charge pumping is encoded in a winding of the spectral flow in the entanglement spectrum over a pump cycle.
Realizing and characterizing interacting topological phases in synthetic quantum systems is a formidable challenge. Here, we propose a Floquet protocol to realize the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model with power-law decaying interactions. Based on analytical and numerical arguments, we show that this model features a quantum phase transition from a spin liquid to a valence bond solid that spontaneously breaks lattice translational symmetry and is reminiscent of the Majumdar-Ghosh state. The different phases can be probed dynamically by measuring the evolution of a fully dimerized state. We moreover introduce an interferometric protocol to characterize the topological excitations and the bulk topological invariants of our interacting many-body system.
The Leggett collective excitations for a two-band Fermi gas with s-wave pairing and Josephson interband coupling in the BCS-BEC crossover at finite temperatures are investigated within the Gaussian pair fluctuation approach. Eigenfrequencies and damping factors for Leggett modes are determined in a nonperturbative way, using the analytic continuation of the fluctuation propagator through a branch cut in the complex frequency plane, as in Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 093403 (2019). The treatment is performed beyond the low-energy expansion, which is necessary when the collective excitation energy reaches the pair-breaking continuum edge. The results are applied in particular to cold atomic gases at the orbital Feshbach resonance and in a regime far from BEC, which can be relevant for future experiments.