We study the Mott transition of a mixed Bose-Fermi system of ultracold atoms in an optical lattice, where the number of (spinless) fermions and bosons adds up to one atom per lattice, n(F)+n(B)=1. For weak interactions, a Fermi surface coexists with a Bose-Einstein condensate while for strong interaction the system is incompressible but still characterized by a Fermi surface of composite fermions. At the critical point, the spectral function of the fermions A(k,ω) exhibits a pseudogapped behavior, rising as |ω| at the Fermi momentum, while in the Mott phase it is fully gapped. Taking into account the interaction between the critical modes leads at very low temperatures either to p-wave pairing or the transition is driven weakly first order. The same mechanism should also be important in antiferromagnetic metals with a small Fermi surface.
We study the Mott transition of a mixed Bose-Fermi system of ultracold atoms in an optical lattice, where the number of (spinless) fermions and bosons adds up to one atom per lattice, n(F)+n(B)=1. For weak interactions, a Fermi surface coexists with a Bose-Einstein condensate while for strong interaction the system is incompressible but still characterized by a Fermi surface of composite fermions. At the critical point, the spectral function of the fermions A(k,ω) exhibits a pseudogapped behavior, rising as |ω| at the Fermi momentum, while in the Mott phase it is fully gapped. Taking into account the interaction between the critical modes leads at very low temperatures either to p-wave pairing or the transition is driven weakly first order. The same mechanism should also be important in antiferromagnetic metals with a small Fermi surface.
Confinement of atoms by laser technology has opened up a new field of physics. Following the realization of Bose– Einstein condensation (BEC) of bosonic atoms, fermionic atom systems and even boson–fermion mixture systems were successfully trapped and cooled. Application of a periodic potential, so called optical lattice, could also unveil interesting nature of the atoms. One of the interesting phenomena of the atoms on optical lattice is Mott transition. Although there is a long history of the study on bosons or fermions on lattice, coexistence of bosons and fermions on lattice is a rather new topic to study. In particular, we have little knowledge about strongly-correlated bosons and fermions on lattice. In our previous works we performed numerical simulations of Bose–Fermi mixtures to clarify the phase diagram and the effect of the confinement potential. When the total number of bosonic and fermionic atoms per site takes an integer value and interatomic interactions are sufficiently strong, the system would undergo Mott transition where the local atom density is fixed to the integer value. A characteristic of this Mott insulating phase is that a boson and fermion located next to each other can exchange their positions by going through a virtual doubly-occupied state with the atom exchange energy t ’ tbtf=Ubf where tb and tf are the hopping energy of the bosons and fermions respectively and Ubf denotes the on-site interaction between the boson and the fermion. Although there still remain a number of open questions on the Mott state of Bose–Fermi mixtures, the property of superfluid state of the strongly-correlated bosons and fermions has yet to be revealed. In this short note we would like to focus on strongly-correlated Bose–Fermi mixtures at commensurate filling in a three-dimensional periodical potential and see characteristic behaviors, if any, of the superfluid phase close to the phase boundary to the Mott insulating phase. In the following analysis we assume uniformity of the system and thus neglect the possibility of the emergence of so-called supersolid where superfluidity and structural long-range order coexist. For simplicity we ignore all the internal degree of freedom of the atoms and the influence of the trap potential which in fact creates a nonuniform density profile of the bosons and fermions. For the system at commensurate filling on optical lattice, we assume that the interatomic interactions are weak enough to avoid formation of Mott state but strong enough to allow us to expect that there are only few empty or doublyoccupied sites and most sites are singly occupied. Namely we analyze the system that stays in a superfluid phase but lies close to the boundary to the Mott phase. Since a boson and fermion located next to each other can exchange their positions as stated above, the energy of the superfluid state of the mixture system is given mostly by the kinetic energy of the bosons and fermions exchanging their positions. We therefore express the Hamiltonian in the following form, ignoring the kinetic energy of the atoms at the empty sites and the interaction energy at the doubly-occupied sites:
We obtain the phase diagram of a Bose-Fermi mixture of hardcore spinless bosons and spin-polarized fermions with nearest-neighbor intraspecies interaction and on-site interspecies repulsion in an optical lattice at half filling using a slave-boson mean-field theory. We show that such a system can have four possible phases which are (a) supersolid bosons coexisting with fermions in the Mott state, (b) Mott state of bosons coexisting with fermions in a metallic or charge-density wave state, (c) a metallic fermionic state coexisting with superfluid phase of bosons, and (d) Mott insulating state of fermions and bosons. We chart out the phase diagram of the system and provide analytical expressions for the phase boundaries within mean-field theory. We demonstrate that the transitions between these phases are generically first order with the exception of that between the supersolid and the Mott states which, within mean-field theory, is a continuous quantum phase transition. We also obtain the low-energy collective excitations of the system in these phases. Finally, we study the particle-hole excitations in the Mott insulating phase and use it to determine the dynamical critical exponent z for the supersolid-Mott insulator transition. We discuss experiments which can test our theory.
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 present a review of properties of ultracold atomic Fermi-Bose mixtures in inhomogeneous and random optical lattices. In the strong interacting limit and at very low temperatures, fermions form, together with bosons or bosonic holes, composite fermions. Composite fermions behave as a spinless interacting Fermi gas, and in the presence of local disorder they interact via random couplings and feel effective random local potential. This opens a wide variety of possibilities of realizing various kinds of ultracold quantum disordered systems. In this paper we review these possibilities, discuss the accessible quantum disordered phases, and methods for their detection. The discussed quantum phases include Fermi glasses, quantum spin glasses, ``dirty'' superfluids, disordered metallic phases, and phases involving quantum percolation.
The mixture of the scalar bosonic and the spinless or polarized fermionic cold atoms in the one-dimensional optical lattice is studied. The system is modeled by the Bose-Fermi-Hubbard Hamiltonian, which shows different behavior from that of the Bose-Hubbard or the Fermi-Hubbard models. Because the $\text{SU}(1\ensuremath{\mid}1)$-supersymmetric Bethe ansatz solution gives an excellent approximation to this kind of mixed cold atomic systems, the ground-state properties of the system such as the densities of state in the momentum space are obtained based on the Bethe ansatz. If the number of bosons is equal to that of fermions and the filling factor is 1, it is found that there exists a critical on-site interaction Uc. If U<Uc, the ground state of the system is in the superfluid phase, while if U>Uc, the ground state is in the insulating phase. The superfluid-insulator transition occurs at Uc. From the analysis of the superfluid density, the value of the critical point is determined as Uc=2.79256, which is larger than the Uc=0 for the Fermi-Hubbard model and smaller than the Uc=3.28 for the Bose-Hubbard model. The elementary excitations and effective Hamiltonian in the strong-coupling limit are also discussed.
We investigate a cold-atom mixture of spinless bosons and fermions in two-dimensional optical lattices. In the presence of a nested Fermi surface, the bosons may develop a fascinating supersolid behavior characterized by a finite superfluid density as well as a spatial density wave order. Focusing on the triangular lattice geometry and combining a general Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson approach with microscopically derived mean-field theory, we find an exotic supersolid phase at a fermionic band filling of nf=3∕4 with a kagome-type crystalline order. We also address the case of anisotropic hopping amplitudes and show that striped supersolid phases emerge on the square and triangular lattices. For weak interactions, the supersolid competes with phase separation. For strong intraspecies and interspecies interactions, with the total number of fermions and bosons corresponding to one particle per site, the bosons form an alternating Mott insulator ground state. Finally, for a mixture of 87Rb40K and 23Na6Li, we show that supersolidity can be observed in the range of accessible temperatures in the square lattice geometry.