We create an artificial graphene system with tunable interactions and study the crossover from metallic to Mott insulating regimes, both in isolated and coupled two-dimensional honeycomb layers. The artificial graphene consists of a two-component spin mixture of an ultracold atomic Fermi gas loaded into a hexagonal optical lattice. For strong repulsive interactions, we observe a suppression of double occupancy and measure a gapped excitation spectrum. We present a quantitative comparison between our measurements and theory, making use of a novel numerical method to obtain Wannier functions for complex lattice structures. Extending our studies to time-resolved measurements, we investigate the equilibration of the double occupancy as a function of lattice loading time.
We create an artificial graphene system with tunable interactions and study the crossover from metallic to Mott insulating regimes, both in isolated and coupled two-dimensional honeycomb layers. The artificial graphene consists of a two-component spin mixture of an ultracold atomic Fermi gas loaded into a hexagonal optical lattice. For strong repulsive interactions, we observe a suppression of double occupancy and measure a gapped excitation spectrum. We present a quantitative comparison between our measurements and theory, making use of a novel numerical method to obtain Wannier functions for complex lattice structures. Extending our studies to time-resolved measurements, we investigate the equilibration of the double occupancy as a function of lattice loading time.
Abstract Cold atoms in an optical lattice with brick-wall geometry have been used to mimic graphene, a two-dimensional material with characteristic Dirac excitations. Here we propose to bring such artificial graphene into the proximity of a second atomic layer with a square lattice geometry. For non-interacting fermions, we find that such bilayer system undergoes a phase transition from a graphene-like semi-metal phase, characterized by a band structure with Dirac points, to a gapped band insulator phase. In the presence of attractive interactions between fermions with pseudospin-1/2 degree of freedom, a competition between semi-metal and superfluid behavior is found at the mean-field level. Using the quantum Monte Carlo method, we also investigate the case of strong repulsive interactions. In the Mott phase, each layer exhibits a different amount of long-range magnetic order. Upon coupling both layers, a valence-bond crystal is formed at a critical coupling strength. Finally, we discuss how these bilayer systems could be realized in existing cold atom experiments.
Semiconductor artificial graphene nanostructures where the Hubbard model parameter U/t can be of the order of 100, provide a highly controllable platform to study strongly correlated quantum many-particle phases. We use accurate variational and diffusion Monte Carlo methods to demonstrate a transition from antiferromagnetic to metallic phases for an experimentally accessible lattice constant a=50 nm in terms of lattice site radius $\ensuremath{\rho}$, for finite-sized artificial honeycomb structures nanopatterned on GaAs quantum wells containing up to 114 electrons. By analyzing spin-spin correlation functions for hexagonal flakes with armchair edges and triangular flakes with zigzag edges, we show that edge type, geometry, and charge nonuniformity affect the steepness and the crossover $\ensuremath{\rho}$ value of the phase transition. For triangular structures, the metal-insulator transition is accompanied with a smoother edge polarization transition.
Complex quantum many-body systems are ubiquitous in nature, yet their behaviour often remains very challenging to predict with analytical or numerical calculations.In this thesis a different approach is presented, using ultracold fermionic 40 K atoms in a lattice with a flexible geometry, formed by interfering laser beams.This system constitutes a precisely tunable, yet very accessible complex system, which can be used to probe -or "quantum simulate" -phenomena predicted for condensed-matter systems.We demonstrate, theoretically and experimentally, how a periodically modulated system can be described by an effective Hamiltonian on longer time-scales.This approach based on Floquet theory applies even when driving the system far from equilibrium.Using oscillating magnetic field gradients, we create an effectively spin-dependent lattice, where the tunnelling rate for different internal atomic states can be freely tuned.The flexible geometry of the lattice is used to create a honeycomb lattice and study the linear band crossings -known as Dirac cones -characteristic of its band structure.We distort the lattice and use momentum-resolved interband transitions probe the deformation and movement of the Dirac cones and their eventual disappearance when moving towards a square or dimerised geometry.We show that circular modulation of a honeycomb lattice induces imaginary next-nearest neighbour tunnelling, which breaks time-reversal symmetry.In addition, a tunable site-offset is used to break inversion symmetry.We thereby realize a model proposed by F.D.M. Haldane in 1988 and study the predicted topological transition from a trivial to a Chern-insulating regime, characterised by a closing band gap.Furthermore, effects of the Berry curvature are observed in both regimes, using transverse drifts of a driven atomic cloud.Using a mixture of two internal states with tunable scattering between them, we study the Hubbard model on a variety of geometries and with a range of observables.The crossover between metal, Mott-insulator and band insulator in a two-and threedimensional Honeycomb lattice is probed by observing the double occupancy, compressibility and excitation spectrum.The addition of a site-offset leads to the appearance of a competing type of density order -an explicit charge-density wave -which is directly probed and leads to new types of excitations.At lower temperatures, magnetic correlations appear.By freezing out the dynamics of the system and adiabatically merging neighbouring sites,the probability to find singlet or triplet states on different patterns of bonds is directly probed.Using this method we study the dependence of magnetic correlations on geometry in seven different lattice structures, and crossovers between them.We find that lower connectivity quantum effects enhance short-range correlations and compare our results to sophisticated numerical approximations.Ramping the lattice from one geometry to another allows for probing the quantum dynamics of re-distributing magnetic correlations, from the sudden to the adiabatic regime.v
Motivated by recent experimental studies that have found signatures of a correlated insulator phase and tuning superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene, we study the temperature-dependent conductivity, the spin correlation and the superconducting pairing correlation within a two-orbital Hubbard model on an emergent honeycomb lattice. Evaluation of the temperature dependence of the conductivity demonstrates that there is a metal-insulator transition, and the Mott phase at strong coupling is accompanied by antiferromagnetic order. The electronic correlation drives a d+id superconducting pairing to be dominant over a wide filling region. All of the dc conductivity, the spin correlation and the superconductivity are suppressed as the interlayer coupling strength increases, and the critical Uc for metal-insulator transition is also reduced. Our intensive numerical results reveal that the TBG should be a uniquely tunable platform for exploring correlated states.
We describe here a quantum simulator of extended bipartite Hubbard model with broken sublattice symmetry. The simulator consists of a structured lateral gate confining two-dimensional electrons in a quantum well into artificial minima arranged in a hexagonal lattice. The sublattice symmetry breaking is generated by forming an artificial triangular graphene quantum dot (ATGQD) with zigzag edges. The resulting extended Hubbard model generates tunable ratio of tunneling strength to electron-electron interactions and of sublattice symmetry with control over shape. The validity of the simulator is confirmed for small systems using mean-field and exact diagonalization many-body approaches which show that the ground state changes from a metallic to an antiferromagnetic (AF) phase by varying the distance between sites or depth of the confining potential. The one-electron spectrum of these triangular dots contains a macroscopically degenerate shell at the Fermi level. The shell persists at the mean-field level for weak interactions (metallic phase) but disappears for strong interactions in the AF phase. We determine the effects of electron-electron interactions on the ground state, the total spin, and the excitation spectrum as a function of filling of the ATGQD. We find that the half-filled charge neutral shell leads to a partially spin-polarized state in both metallic and AF regimes in accordance with Lieb's theorem. In both regimes a relatively large gap separates the spin-polarized ground state to the first excited many-body state at half-filling of the degenerate shell. By adding or removing an electron, this gap drops dramatically, and alternate total spin states emerge with energies nearly degenerate to a spin-polarized ground state.
Artificial crystal lattices can be used to tune repulsive Coulomb interactions between electrons. We trapped electrons, confined as a two-dimensional gas in a gallium arsenide quantum well, in a nanofabricated lattice with honeycomb geometry. We probed the excitation spectrum in a magnetic field, identifying collective modes that emerged from the Coulomb interaction in the artificial lattice, as predicted by the Mott-Hubbard model. These observations allow us to determine the Hubbard gap and suggest the existence of a Coulomb-driven ground state.