No Arabic abstract
Interfacing unbiased quantum Monte Carlo simulations with state-of-art analytic continuation techniques, we obtain exact numerical results for dynamical density and spin correlations in the attractive Hubbard model, describing a spin-balanced two-dimensional cold Fermi gas on an optical lattice. We focus on half-filling, where on average one fermion occupies each lattice site, and the system displays an intriguing supersolid phase: a superfluid with a checkerboard density modulation. The coexistence of $U(1)$ broken symmetry and the density modulations makes this regime very challenging and interesting for the calculation of dynamical properties. We compare our unbiased results with state-of-the-art Generalized Random Phase Approximation calculations: both approaches agree on a well-defined low-energy Nambu-Goldstone collective mode in the density correlations, while the higher energy structures appear to differ significantly. We also observe an interesting high-energy spin mode. We argue that our results provide a robust benchmark for Generalized Random Phase Approximation techniques, which are widely considered to be the method of choice for dynamical correlations in Fermi gases. Also, our calculations yield new physical insight in the high-energy behavior of the dynamical structure factor of the attractive Hubbard model, which is a well known prototype lattice model for superconductors and is a fertile field to target the observation of collective modes in strongly correlated systems.
We propose a model to realize a fermionic superfluid state in an optical lattice circumventing the cooling problem. Our proposal exploits the idea of tuning the interaction in a characteristically low entropy state, a band-insulator in an optical bilayer system, to obtain a superfluid. By performing a detailed analysis of the model including fluctuations and augmented by a variational quantum Monte Carlo calculations of the ground state, we show that the superfluid state obtained has high transition temperature of the order of the hopping energy. Our system is designed to suppress other competing orders such as a charge density wave. We suggest a laboratory realization of this model via an orthogonally shaken optical lattice bilayer.
We demonstrate fluorescence microscopy of individual fermionic potassium atoms in a 527-nm-period optical lattice. Using electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) cooling on the 770.1-nm D$_1$ transition of $^{40}$K, we find that atoms remain at individual sites of a 0.3-mK-deep lattice, with a $1/e$ pinning lifetime of $67(9),rm{s}$, while scattering $sim 10^3$ photons per second. The plane to be imaged is isolated using microwave spectroscopy in a magnetic field gradient, and can be chosen at any depth within the three-dimensional lattice. With a similar protocol, we also demonstrate patterned selection within a single lattice plane. High resolution images are acquired using a microscope objective with 0.8 numerical aperture, from which we determine the occupation of lattice sites in the imaging plane with 94(2)% fidelity per atom. Imaging with single-atom sensitivity and addressing with single-site accuracy are key steps towards the search for unconventional superfluidity of fermions in optical lattices, the initialization and characterization of transport and non-equilibrium dynamics, and the observation of magnetic domains.
We investigate the many-body dissipative dynamics of fermionic atoms in an optical lattice in the presence of incoherent light scattering. Deriving and solving a master equation to describe this process microscopically for many particles, we observe contrasting behaviour in terms of the robustness against this type of heating for different many-body states. In particular, we find that the magnetic correlations exhibited by a two-component gas in the Mott insulating phase should be particularly robust against decoherence from light scattering, because the decoherence in the lowest band is suppressed by a larger factor than the timescales for effective superexchange interactions that drive coherent dynamics. Furthermore, the derived formalism naturally generalizes to analogous states with SU(N) symmetry. In contrast, for typical atomic and laser parameters, two-particle correlation functions describing bound dimers for strong attractive interactions exhibit superradiant effects due to the indistinguishability of off-resonant photons scattered by atoms in different internal states. This leads to rapid decay of correlations describing off-diagonal long-range order for these states. Our predictions should be directly measurable in ongoing experiments, providing a basis for characterising and controlling heating processes in quantum simulation with fermions.
We study experimentally the stability of excited, interacting states of bosons in a double-well optical lattice in regimes where the nonlinear interactions are expected to induce swallowtail looped band structure. By carefully preparing different initial coherent states and observing their subsequent decay, we observe distinct decay rates that provide direct evidence for multivalued, looped band structure. The double well lattice both stabilizes the looped band structure and allows for dynamic preparation of different initial states, including states within the loop structure. We confirm our state preparation procedure with dynamic Gross-Pitaevskii calculations. The excited loop states are found to be more stable than dynamically unstable ground states, but decay faster than expected based on a mean-field stability calculation, indicating the importance of correlations beyond a mean field description.
We report on a new method to calibrate the depth of an optical lattice. It consists in triggering the intrasite dipole mode of the cloud by a sudden phase shift. The corresponding oscillatory motion is directly related to the intraband frequencies on a large range of lattice depths. Remarkably, for a moderate displacement, a single frequency dominates this oscillation for the zeroth and first order interference pattern observed after a sufficiently long time-of-flight. The method is robust against atom-atom interactions and the exact value of the extra external confinement of the initial trapping potential.