No Arabic abstract
The Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) mechanism, building upon proliferation of topological defects in 2D systems, is the first example of phase transition beyond the Landau-Ginzburg paradigm of symmetry breaking. Such a topological phase transition has long been sought yet undiscovered directly in magnetic materials. Here, we pin down two transitions that bound a BKT phase in an ideal 2D frustrated magnet TmMgGaO$_4$, via nuclear magnetic resonance under in-plane magnetic fields, which do not disturb the low-energy electronic states and allow BKT fluctuations to be detected sensitively. Moreover, by applying out-of-plane fields, we find a critical scaling behaviour of the magnetic susceptibility expected for the BKT transition. The experimental findings can be explained by quantum Monte Carlo simulations applied on an accurate triangular-lattice Ising model of the compound which hosts a BKT phase. These results provide a concrete example for the BKT phase and offer an ideal platform for future investigations on the BKT physics in magnetic materials.
We experimentally investigate the first-order correlation function of a trapped Fermi gas in the two-dimensional BEC-BCS crossover. We observe a transition to a low-temperature superfluid phase with algebraically decaying correlations. We show that the spatial coherence of the entire trapped system can be characterized by a single temperature-dependent exponent. We find the exponent at the transition to be constant over a wide range of interaction strengths across the crossover. This suggests that the phase transitions in both the bosonic regime and the strongly interacting crossover regime are of Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless-type and lie within the same universality class. On the bosonic side of the crossover, our data are well-described by Quantum Monte Carlo calculations for a Bose gas. In contrast, in the strongly interacting regime, we observe a superfluid phase which is significantly influenced by the fermionic nature of the constituent particles.
Superfluidity in its various forms has fascinated scientists since the observation of frictionless flow in liquid helium II. In three spatial dimensions (3D), it is conceptually associated with the emergence of long-range order (LRO) at a critical temperature $T_{text{c}}$. One of its hallmarks, predicted by the highly successful two-fluid model and observed in both liquid helium and ultracold atomic gases, is the existence of two kinds of sound excitations, the first and second sound. In 2D systems, thermal fluctuations preclude LRO, but superfluidity nevertheless emerges at a nonzero $T_{text{c}}$ via the infinite-order Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition, which is associated with a universal jump in the superfluid density $n_{text{s}}$ without any discontinuities in the fluids thermodynamic properties. BKT superfluids are also predicted to support two sounds, but the observation of this has remained elusive. Here we observe first and second sound in a homogeneous 2D atomic Bose gas, and from the two temperature-dependent sound speeds extract its superfluid density. Our results agree with BKT theory, including the prediction for the universal superfluid-density jump.
We study the critical point for the emergence of coherence in a harmonically trapped two-dimensional Bose gas with tuneable interactions. Over a wide range of interaction strengths we find excellent agreement with the classical-field predictions for the critical point of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) superfluid transition. This allows us to quantitatively show, without any free parameters, that the interaction-driven BKT transition smoothly converges onto the purely quantum-statistical Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) transition in the limit of vanishing interactions.
In this Letter we will show that, in the presence of a properly modulated Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction, a $U(1)$ vortex-antivortex lattice appears at low temperatures for a wide range of the DM interaction. Even more, in the region dominated by the exchange interaction, a standard BKT transition occurs. In the opposite regime, the one dominated by the DM interaction, a kind of inverse BKT transition (iBKT) takes place. As temperature rises, the vortex-antivortex lattice starts melting by annihilation of pairs of vortex-antivortex, in a sort of inverse BKT transition.
We discuss how to locate critical points in the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) universality class by means of gap-scaling analyses. While accurately determining such points using gap extrapolation procedures is usually challenging and inaccurate due to the exponentially small value of the gap in the vicinity of the critical point, we show that a generic gap-scaling analysis, including the effects of logarithmic corrections, provides very accurate estimates of BKT transition points in a variety of spin and fermionic models. As a first example, we show how the scaling procedure, combined with density-matrix-renormalization-group simulations, performs extremely well in a non-integrable spin-$3/2$ XXZ model, which is known to exhibit strong finite-size effects. We then analyze the extended Hubbard model, whose BKT transition has been debated, finding results that are consistent with previous studies based on the scaling of the Luttinger-liquid parameter. Finally, we investigate an anisotropic extended Hubbard model, for which we present the first estimates of the BKT transition line based on large-scale density-matrix-renormalization-group simulations. Our work demonstrates how gap-scaling analyses can help to locate accurately and efficiently BKT critical points, without relying on model-dependent scaling assumptions.