No Arabic abstract
We propose methods for synthesizing multilayer optical lattices of cold atoms in a layer-by-layer manner, to unlock the potential of optical lattices in simulating the fascinating physics of multilayer systems. Central to the approach is to compress the beam profile of a red-detuned Gaussian laser beam from disklike to a thin line by a telescope with two cylindrical lenses. A highly tunable multilayer optical lattice is obtained by passing the compressed Gaussian beam through an optical device consisting of beam splitters, mirrors, and glass plates. We illustrate the proposal with the displaced dice lattice, which is a trilayer lattice that maps to the dice lattice when projected to the same layer. Both the dice model and its interesting variants may be realized. For a model of fermionic cold atoms, featuring an isolated flat band between two dispersive bands, we find valley-contrasting interband transitions involving the flat band.
We consider ultracold atoms in a two-dimensional optical lattice of the dice geometry in a tight-binding regime. The atoms experience a laser-assisted tunneling between the nearest neighbour sites of the dice lattice accompanied by the momentum recoil. This allows one to engineer staggered synthetic magnetic fluxes over plaquettes, and thus pave a way towards a realization of topologically nontrivial band structures. In such a lattice the real-valued next-neighbour transitions are not needed to reach a topological regime. Yet, such transitions can increase a variety of the obtained topological phases. The dice lattice represents a triangular Bravais lattice with a three-site basis consisting of a hub site connected to two rim sites. As a consequence, the dice lattice supports three dispersion bands. From this point of view, our model can be interpreted as a generalization of the paradigmatic Haldane model which is reproduced if one of the two rim sub-lattices is eliminated. We demonstrate that the proposed upgrade of the Haldane model creates a significant added value, including an easy access to topological semimetal phases relying only on the nearest neighbour coupling, as well as enhanced topological band structures featuring Chern numbers higher than one. The numerical investigation is supported and complemented by an analytical scheme based on the study of singularities in the Berry connection.
Optical lattices have emerged as ideal simulators for Hubbard models of strongly correlated materials, such as the high-temperature superconducting cuprates. In optical lattice experiments, microscopic parameters such as the interaction strength between particles are well known and easily tunable. Unfortunately, this benefit of using optical lattices to study Hubbard models come with one clear disadvantage: the energy scales in atomic systems are typically nanoKelvin compared with Kelvin in solids, with a correspondingly miniscule temperature scale required to observe exotic phases such as d-wave superconductivity. The ultra-low temperatures necessary to reach the regime in which optical lattice simulation can have an impact-the domain in which our theoretical understanding fails-have been a barrier to progress in this field. To move forward, a concerted effort to develop new techniques for cooling and, by extension, techniques to measure even lower temperatures. This article will be devoted to discussing the concepts of cooling and thermometry, fundamental sources of heat in optical lattice experiments, and a review of proposed and implemented thermometry and cooling techniques.
Originally, the Hubbard model has been derived for describing the behaviour of strongly-correlated electrons in solids. However, since over a decade now, variations of it are also routinely being implemented with ultracold atoms in optical lattices. We review some of the rich literature on this subject, with a focus on more recent non-standard forms of the Hubbard model. After an introduction to standard (fermionic and bosonic) Hubbard models, we discuss briefly common models for mixtures, as well as the so called extended Bose-Hubbard models, that include interactions between neighboring sites, next-neighboring sites, and so on. The main part of the review discusses the importance of additional terms appearing when refining the tight-binding approximation on the original physical Hamiltonian. Even when restricting the models to the lowest Bloch band is justified, the standard approach neglects the density-induced tunneling (which has the same origin as the usual on-site interaction). The importance of these contributions is discussed for both contact and dipolar interactions. For sufficiently strong interactions, also the effects related to higher Bloch bands become important even for deep optical lattices. Different approaches that aim at incorporating these effects, mainly via dressing the basis Wannier functions with interactions, leading to effective, density-dependent Hubbard-type models, are reviewed. We discuss also examples of Hubbard-like models that explicitly involve higher $p$-orbitals, as well as models that couple dynamically spin and orbital degrees of freedom. Finally, we review mean-field nonlinear-Schrodinger models of the Salerno type that share with the non-standard Hubbard models the nonlinear coupling between the adjacent sites. In that part, discrete solitons are the main subject of the consideration. We conclude by listing some future open problems.
Quantised sound waves -- phonons -- govern the elastic response of crystalline materials, and also play an integral part in determining their thermodynamic properties and electrical response (e.g., by binding electrons into superconducting Cooper pairs). The physics of lattice phonons and elasticity is absent in simulators of quantum solids constructed of neutral atoms in periodic light potentials: unlike real solids, traditional optical lattices are silent because they are infinitely stiff. Optical-lattice realisations of crystals therefore lack some of the central dynamical degrees of freedom that determine the low-temperature properties of real materials. Here, we create an optical lattice with phonon modes using a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) coupled to a confocal optical resonator. Playing the role of an active quantum gas microscope, the multimode cavity QED system both images the phonons and induces the crystallisation that supports phonons via short-range, photon-mediated atom-atom interactions. Dynamical susceptibility measurements reveal the phonon dispersion relation, showing that these collective excitations exhibit a sound speed dependent on the BEC-photon coupling strength. Our results pave the way for exploring the rich physics of elasticity in quantum solids, ranging from quantum melting transitions to exotic fractonic topological defects in the quantum regime.
Recent realisation of three-dimensional optical lattice clocks circumvents short range collisional clock shifts which have been the bottle neck towards higher precision; the long range electronic dipole-dipole interaction between the atoms becomes the primary source of clock shift due to interatomic interactions. We study the Rabi spectroscopy of three-dimensional optical lattice clocks with unity filling. From the Lindblad equation governing the time evolution of the density matrix of the atoms, we derive the Bloch equations in the presence of the external Rabi driving laser field, and solve the equations approximately to the first order of the coupling strength of the dipole-dipole interaction between the atoms. We find that the clock shift equals to the product of the coupling strength, a factor determined by the parameters of the Rabi pulse, and another factor depending on the configuration of the three-dimensional optical lattice. Our result on the clock shift within the Rabi spectroscopy can be checked by measurement in future experiment.