We study a gas of strongly polarized cold fermions in an optical lattice when the excited $p$ bands are populated. We derive the relevant Hamiltonian and discuss the expected phase diagram for both repulsive and attractive interactions. In the parameter regime covered here, checkerboard antiferromagnetic ordering is found to be possible for repulsive interactions, while for attractive interactions, transitions between different types of paired phases are predicted.
We study a gas of strongly polarized cold fermions in an optical lattice when the excited p bands are populated. We derive the relevant Hamiltonian and discuss the expected phase diagram for both repulsive and attractive interactions. In the parameter regime covered here, checkerboard antiferromagnetic ordering is found to be possible for repulsive interactions, while for attractive interactions, transitions between different types of paired phases are predicted.
In this paper we address the behavior of the superfluid transition temperature Tc in the attractive Hubbard model. The attractive Hubbard model can be regarded as the generalization of the BCS to Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) crossover to a lattice and, as such, may have implications for future optical lattice studies. Nevertheless, the BEC limit of the Hubbard model is very different from that of the better-studied Fermi gases, owing to the strong intersite repulsion between pairs. Here we address systematically the effects of pairing fluctuations for all filling fractions over the entire range of attractive interaction strength. A central conclusion of our work is that in a lattice, around half filling, the smooth evolution from the BCS to the BEC limits is interrupted: Tc vanishes when the system approaches the bosonic regime with increasing interaction strength. We suggest that this interruption of crossover may signal a quantum critical transition to another form of superfluid not continuously connected to a BCS-like phase. A simple variational ansatz for an alternate ground state in this more strongly coupled superfluid is presented. A generalization of the (s-wave) Hubbard model to d-wave pairing allows us to address issues of relevance to high-Tc superconductivity. The phase diagram (representing the pairing or pseudogap onset temperature T∗ and Tc) shows that here too one observes a vanishing of Tc when T∗ becomes sufficiently large. Given this predicted breakdown of the crossover, and given the striking similarity to features of the cuprate phase diagram, we suggest that future experiments on ultracold fermions in optical lattices should not be exclusively limited to the repulsive Hubbard model, but should address the attractive model in order to elucidate features of high-temperature superconductivity.
A mixture of ultracold bosons and fermions placed in an optical lattice constitutes a novel kind of quantum gas, and leads to phenomena, which so far has been discussed neither in atomic physics, nor in condensed matter physics. We discuss the phase diagram at low temperatures, and in the limit of strong atom-atom interactions, and predict the existence of quantum phases that involve pairing of fermions with one or more bosons, or, respectively, bosonic holes. The resulting composite fermions may form, depending on the system parameters, a normal Fermi liquid, a density wave, a superfluid liquid, or an insulator with fermionic domains. We discuss the feasibility for observing such phases in current experiments.
We study two-band effects on ultracold fermionic atoms in optical lattices by means of dynamical mean-field theory. We find that at half filling an atomic-density-wave (ADW) state emerges owing to the two-band effects in the attractive interaction region, while an antiferromagnetic state appears in the repulsive interaction region. As the orbital splitting is increased, quantum phase transitions from the ADW state to the superfluid state and from the antiferromagnetic state to the metallic state occur in the corresponding regions. By systematically changing the orbital splitting and the interaction, we obtain the phase diagram at half filling. The results are discussed using the effective boson model derived for strong attractive interaction.
We investigate different ground-state phases of attractive spin-imbalanced populations of fermions in three-dimensional optical lattices. Detailed numerical calculations are performed using Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov theory to determine the ground-state properties systematically for different values of density, spin polarization and interaction strength. We first consider the high density and low polarization regime, in which the effect of the optical lattice is most evident. We then proceed to the low density and high polarization regime where the effects of the underlying lattice are less significant and the system begins to resemble a continuum Fermi gas. We explore the effects of density, polarization and interaction on the character of the phases in each regime and highlight the qualitative differences between the two regimes. In the high-density regime, the order is found to be of Larkin-Ovchinnikov type, linearly oriented with one characteristic wave vector but varying in its direction with the parameters. At lower densities the order parameter develops more structures involving multiple wave vectors.
We study Fermi gases in a three-dimensional cubic optical lattice with five fermions per site, i.e., the s band is completely filled and the p band with threefold degeneracy is half filled. We show that for repulsive interaction between fermions, the system will exhibit spin-3/2 antiferromagnetic order at low temperature. This conclusion is obtained both in strong interaction regime by strong coupling expansion and in weak interaction regime by the Hartree--Fock mean-field theory with analysis of the Fermi surface nesting. We also show that in the strongly correlated regime the N\'eel temperature for p band antiferromagnetism is 2 to 3 orders of magnitudes higher than that of s band, which is much more promising to be attained in cold atom experiments.
In this thesis, we discuss ultracold quantum gases both in continuum and optical lattices. For the continuum Fermi gases in BCS-BEC crossover, we present an effective field theory study on the recently discovered puzzling damping phenomena on the BCS side of the crossover. We find that in contrast to the previous proposed pair-breaking mechanism of damping, the damping process is due to the interaction between superfluid phonons and thermally excited fermionic quasi particles. Results from our effective field theory are compared quantitatively with experiments, showing a good agreement. For the ultracold fermionic atoms in optical lattices, we propose two novel quantum phases. Firstly, we show that a novel superconducting pairing occurs for spin-imbalanced Fermi gases with the spin up and down Fermi levels lying within the px- and s- orbital bands of a quasi-one-dimensional optical lattice. The pairs condense at a finite momentum equal to the sum of the two Fermi momenta of spin up and down fermions, and form a p-orbital condensate. The phase diagram shows that the p-orbital pair condensate occurs in a wide range of fillings. Secondly, we study instabilities of single-species fermionic atoms in the p-orbital bands in two-dimensional square optical lattices. From the nearly-perfect nesting Fermi surfaces, charge density wave and orbital density wave orderings with stripe or checkerboard patterns are found for attractive and repulsive interactions, respectively. The superconducting phase, usually expected of attractively interacting fermions, is strongly suppressed. We also use field theory to analyze the possible liquid crystal phases in our system. For bosons, we study ultracold bosonic atoms loaded in a one-dimensional optical lattice of two-fold p-orbital degeneracy at each site, and find an anti-ferro-orbital, a homogeneous px Mott insulator phase and two kinds of superfluid phases distinguished by the orbital ordering.