Recently it was shown that anyons on the two-sphere naturally arise from a system of molecular impurities exchanging angular momentum with a many-particle bath (Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 015301 (2021)). Here we further advance this approach and rigorously demonstrate that in the experimentally realized regime the lowest spectrum of two linear molecules immersed in superfluid helium corresponds to the spectrum of two anyons on the sphere. We develop the formalism within the framework of the recently experimentally observed angulon quasiparticle.
Phase transitions are ubiquitous in our three-dimensional world. By contrast most conventional transitions do not occur in infinite uniform two-dimensional systems because of the increased role of thermal fluctuations. Here we explore the dimensional crossover of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) for a weakly interacting atomic gas confined in a novel quasi-two-dimensional geometry, with a flat in-plane trap bottom. We detect the onset of an extended phase coherence, using velocity distribution measurements and matter-wave interferometry. We relate this coherence to the transverse condensation phenomenon, in which a significant fraction of atoms accumulate in the ground state of the motion perpendicular to the atom plane. We also investigate the dynamical aspects of the transition through the detection of topological defects that are nucleated in a quench cooling of the gas, and we compare our results to the predictions of the Kibble-Zurek theory for the conventional BEC second-order phase transition.
The dynamics of quantum phase transitions poses one of the most challenging problems in modern many-body physics. Here, we study a prototypical example in a clean and well-controlled ultracold atom setup by observing the emergence of coherence when crossing the Mott insulator to superfluid quantum phase transition. In the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model, we find perfect agreement between experimental observations and numerical simulations for the resulting coherence length. We thereby perform a largely certified analogue quantum simulation of this strongly correlated system reaching beyond the regime of free quasiparticles. Experimentally, we additionally explore the emergence of coherence in higher dimensions where no classical simulations are available, as well as for negative temperatures. For intermediate quench velocities, we observe a power-law behaviour of the coherence length, reminiscent of the Kibble-Zurek mechanism. However, we find exponents that strongly depend on the final interaction strength and thus lie outside the scope of this mechanism.
We propose a scheme to realize the Kondo model with tunable anisotropy using alkaline-earth atoms in an optical lattice. The new feature of our setup is Floquet engineering of interactions using time-dependent Zeeman shifts, that can be realized either using state-dependent optical Stark shifts or magnetic fields. The properties of the resulting Kondo model strongly depend on the anisotropy of the ferromagnetic interactions. In particular, easy-plane couplings give rise to Kondo singlet formation even though microscopic interactions are all ferromagnetic. We discuss both equilibrium and dynamical properties of the system that can be measured with ultracold atoms, including the impurity spin susceptibility, the impurity spin relaxation rate, as well as the equilibrium and dynamical spin correlations between the impurity and the ferromagnetic bath atoms. We analyze the non-equilibrium time evolution of the system using a variational non-Gaussian approach, which allows us to explore coherent dynamics over both short and long timescales, as set by the bandwidth and the Kondo singlet formation, respectively. In the quench-type experiments, when the Kondo interaction is suddenly switched on, we find that real-time dynamics shows crossovers reminiscent of poor mans renormalization group flow used to describe equilibrium systems. For bare easy-plane ferromagnetic couplings, this allows us to follow the formation of the Kondo screening cloud as the dynamics crosses over from ferromagnetic to antiferromagnetic behavior. On the other side of the phase diagram, our scheme makes it possible to measure quantum corrections to the well-known Korringa law describing the temperature dependence of the impurity spin relaxation rate. Theoretical results discussed in our paper can be measured using currently available experimental techniques.
We investigate two different types of relativistic Kondo effects, distinguished by heavy-impurity degrees of freedom, by focusing on the energy-momentum dispersion relations of the ground state with condensates composed of a light Dirac fermion and a nonrelativistic impurity fermion. Heavy fermion degrees of freedom are introduced in terms of two types of heavy-fermion effective theories, in other words, two heavy-fermion limits for the heavy Dirac fermion, which are known as the heavy-quark effective theories (HQETs) in high-energy physics. While the first one includes only the heavy-particle component, the second one contains both the heavy-particle and heavy-antiparticle components, which are opposite in their parity. From these theories, we obtain two types of Kondo effects, in which the dispersions near the Fermi surface are very similar, but they differ in the structure at low momentum. We also classify the possible forms of condensates in the two limits. The two Kondo effects will be examined by experiments with Dirac/Weyl semimetals or quark matter, lattice simulations, and cold-atom simulations.
Using the discrete Gross-Pitaevskii equation on a three-dimensional cubic lattice, we numerically investigate energy quench dynamics in the vicinity of the continuous U(1) ordering transition. The post-quench relaxation is accompanied by a transient order revival: during non-equilibrium stages, the order parameter temporarily exceeds its vanishing equilibrium pre-quench value. The revival is associated with slowly relaxing population of lattice sites aggregating large portions of the potential energy. To observe the revival, no preliminary fine-tuning of the model parameters is necessary. Our findings suggest that the order revival may be a robust feature of a broad class of models. This premise is consistent with the experimental observations of the revival in dissimilar classes of condensed matter systems.