By using a modulated magnetic field in a Feshbach resonance for ultracold fermionic atoms in optical lattices, we show that it is possible to engineer a class of models usually referred to as correlated-hopping models. These models differ from the Hubbard model in exhibiting additional density-dependent interaction terms that affect the hopping processes. In addition to the spin-SU(2) symmetry, they also possess a charge-SU(2) symmetry, which opens the possibility of investigating the $\ensuremath{\eta}$-pairing mechanism for superconductivity introduced by Yang for the Hubbard model. We discuss the known solution of the model in one dimension (where $\ensuremath{\eta}$ states have been found in the degenerate manifold of the ground state) and show that, away from the integrable point, quantum Monte Carlo simulations at half filling predict the emergence of a phase with coexisting incommensurate spin and charge order.
By using a modulated magnetic field in a Feshbach resonance for ultracold fermionic atoms in optical lattices, we show that it is possible to engineer a class of models usually referred to as correlated-hopping models. These models differ from the Hubbard model in exhibiting additional density-dependent interaction terms that affect the hopping processes. In addition to the spin-SU(2) symmetry, they also possess a charge-SU(2) symmetry, which opens the possibility of investigating the \ensuremathη-pairing mechanism for superconductivity introduced by Yang for the Hubbard model. We discuss the known solution of the model in one dimension (where \ensuremathη states have been found in the degenerate manifold of the ground state) and show that, away from the integrable point, quantum Monte Carlo simulations at half filling predict the emergence of a phase with coexisting incommensurate spin and charge order.
In this thesis, we discuss quantum phase transitions in low-dimensional optical lattices, namely one- and two-dimensional lattices. The dimensional confinement is realized in experiments by suppressing the hopping in the extra dimensions through a deep potential barrier that prevents the atoms to tunnel across dimensions. The dimensionality considerably affects the physical behavior of the system. For instance, in one dimension, the celebrated Fermi-liquid theory does not describe the many-body behavior of a fermionic system. There are no single particle excitations, but instead collective behavior, and spin and charge degrees of freedom are decoupled . In the first part of this thesis, we consider one-dimensional fermionic gases under the effect of time-dependent driving forces. First, we describe a proposal to realize non-standard Hubbard models that display correlated-hopping terms by modulating interactions through a time-dependent magnetic field. The extra terms describe hopping processes that depend on the particle-density difference in neighboring sites. The effective model is obtained in arbitrary spatial dimensions, but only in one-dimension it is known to be exactly solvable for specific values of the parameters. Moreover, an SU(2) symmetry in the charge sector allows to construct non-trivial superconducting eigenstates (eta-states), discovered by Yang as excited states of the Hubbard model. Then, we study a one-dimensional bipartite optical lattice with fermionic atoms at half-filling. The lattice potential barriers have heights alternating in magnitude. As a consequence, the hopping amplitudes also alternate in magnitude and the elementary unit cell has two sites. This system is known to display Peierls dimerization at half-filling: the fermions form dimers in neighboring sites that inhibit transport and open a gap in the spectrum. After applying shaking on this system we discover that one can dynamically induce a phase transition to an unconventional metallic state with four Fermi-points. The second part of this thesis describes bosonic systems in two-dimensional optical lattices. First, we consider a square optical lattice with alternating deep-shallow wells arranged in a checkerboard pattern. This lattice is realized in the experimental laboratory of Prof. Hemmerich in Hamburg. In the experiment, the visibility is extracted from the time-of-flight imaging to quantify the phase coherence of the bosonic gas. We develop a mean-field theory and determine the phase diagram of this model. We interpret the experimental data by assuming that at large detuning, only the deeper wells are populated and form an imbalanced Mott insulator with empty shallow wells and integer density on the deeper wells. We support this hypothesis by large-scale Gutzwiller calculations. Then, we investigate a system of bosons in the Lieb lattice, which is the lattice geometry of the Cu-O plane in cuprates . We consider configurations of the optical potential where s and p orbitals sitting on neighboring wells become resonant and hybridize. The interest in this problem comes from the possibility to realize time-reversal broken phases, usually known as Varma phases for electronic systems, which have been proposed to explain the pseudo-gap regime of cuprate superconductors. We show the conditions under which the symmetry breaking in a four-band model can lead to states with loop currents. Moreover, the lowest branch of the excitation spectrum has a non-vanishing Chern number and therefore supports topological excitations.
Over the past few decades, quantum simulation with ultracold atoms in optical lattices has proven to be a useful tool for understanding many-body Hamiltonians.One of its primary directions is the experimental study of the Fermi Hubbard Model (FHM), which aims to capture the fundamental properties of cuprate superconductors and has produced a wide range of intriguing phenomena, including the metal-to-Mott insulator transition, antiferromagnetism, strange metallicity, pseudogap physics, and is frequently used in the study of superconductivity. In recent years, new kinds of quantum simulators have emerged, and in particular we focus on two of them: 1) quantum simulators that study high symmetry fermions in optical lattices, and 2) optical tweezer arrays which provide a bottom-up approach to engineering the FHM. The first class of emerging quantum simulators utilizes alkaline-earth-like atoms (AEA’s) – which have large nuclear spin I (such as 173Yb and 87Sr) – to engineer the SU(N = 2I +1) symmetric FHM, where N = 2,..., 10. The second class corresponds to quantum simulators based on optical tweezer arrays which combine deterministic single tweezer ground state loading and tunneling coupled sites. Both classes of quantum simulators are interesting on their own. For example, the SU(N) FHM is generating a lot of interest due to its connections to multiorbital solid state systems and theoretical predictions of rich phase diagrams which exhibit exotic phases of matter, including unusual ones like spin liquids. On the other hand, optical tweezer arrays have gained a lot of attention since they can be used to study arbitrary geometries and access very low-entropy samples. This thesis reports on the numerical study of both quantum simulation architectures. Results of the SU(N) FHM at finite temperature, for different fillings and interaction strengths that span the non-interacting to the strongly interacting limit are obtained using Determinant Quantum Monte Carlo, Exact Diagonalization, and Numerical Linked Cluster Expansion. In particular, we focus on how thermodynamic and magnetic observables, such as the number of on-site pairs, energy, entropy, spin correlations, and structure factors depend on N, the interaction strength U/t, temperature T/t, and the anisotropy of tunneling rates. Our results demonstrate that in a homogeneous square lattice with one particle per site on average, thermodynamic observables as a function of temperature obey a universal scaling with N, and that short-range antiferromagnetic correlations are stronger for larger N and in lower dimensions. In addition, we present theory-experiment comparisons where possible, where we perform thermometry and provide a precise characterization of the equation of state of the SU(N) FHM. Our results emerge as a tool to perform thermometry in experiments from theory-experiment comparison and also provide guidance for future experiments with AEAs in optical lattices. Additionally, we present calculations using numerically precise discrete variable representation methods for two-dimensional stroboscopic tweezer arrays and compare the outcomes with experimental data. We quantify the effects of stroboscopic potentials on Hubbard parameters like the interaction strength U and the tunneling t in optical tweezer arrays and illustrate how heating from the stroboscopic potential relies on strobe frequency. Our calculations enable evaluation and optimization of two-dimensional tweezer array experiments. An important milestone of the results of this thesis corresponds to the record temperatures and entropies achieved with these quantum simulation architectures: 1) the coldest fermions ever created in nature in absolute temperature and in cold atoms, and 2) the lowest entropy per particle fermions ever created, albeit in a so-far small system.
This thesis discusses mainly two Fermionic lattice systems, first a Kondo lattice with additional Hubbard interaction and second a Hubbard Hamiltonian augmented with additional spin and charge interactions. We first introduce the Quantum Monte Carlo technique, which is then employed to study the two respective systems. We present an innovation that allows to calculate time displaced Greens functions more efficiently. Compared with previously used numerically stable algorithms the new method gains an order of magnitude in speed, but is just as precise, and very simple to implement. In the second chapter we consider the Kondo lattice model in two dimensions at half filling. In addition to the Fermionic hopping integral t and the superexchange coupling J the role of a Coulomb repulsion U in the conduction band is investigated. We find the model to display a magnetic order-disorder transition in the U-J plane with a critical value of Jc which is decreasing as a function of U. The single-particle spectral function A(k,ω) is computed across this transition. We conclude that (i) the local screening of impurity spins determines the low-energy behavior of the spectral function and (ii) one cannot deform continuously the spectral function of the half-filled Hubbard model at J=0 to that of the Kondo insulator at J>Jc. In the third chapter we investigate the phase diagram of a new model that exhibits a first order transition between s-wave superconducting and antiferromagnetic phases. The model, a generalized Hubbard model augmented with competing spin-spin and pair-pair interactions, was investigated using the projector quantum Monte Carlo method. Upon varying the Hubbard U from attractive to repulsive, we find a first order phase transition between superconducting and antiferromagnetic states.
We study various Mott insulating phases of interacting spin-23 fermionic ultracold atoms in two-dimensional square optical lattices at half filling. Using a generalized one-band Hubbard model with hidden SO(5) symmetry, we identify two distinct symmetry breaking phases: the degenerate antiferromagnetic spin-dipole--spin-octupole ordering and spin-quadrupole ordering, depending on the sign of the spin-dependent interaction. These two competing orders exhibit very different symmetry properties, low energy excitations, and topological characterizations. Near the SU(4) symmetric point, a quantum critical state with a $\ensuremath{\pi}$-flux phase may emerge due to strong quantum fluctuations, leading to spin algebraic correlations and gapless excitations.
We present a numerically exact study of the Hubbard model with spin-dependent anisotropic hopping on the square lattice using auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo method. At half filling, the system undergoes Ising phase transitions on cooling, leading to the formation of Ising-type antiferromagnetic order for repulsive interactions and charge-density wave order for attractive interactions at finite temperatures. By elegantly implementing the sign-problem-free condition and Hubbard-Stratonovich transformations, we achieve significant improvements in precision control of the numerical calculations and obtain highly accurate results of the transition temperatures from weak to strong interactions across representative anisotropies. We further characterize the system by examining the temperature dependence of various thermodynamic properties, including the energy, double occupancy, specific heat, and charge susceptibility. Specifically, we provide unbiased numerical results of the entropy map on temperature-interaction plane, the critical entropy, and the spin, singlon and doublon correlations, all of which are directly measurable in optical lattice experiments. Away from half filling, we explore the behavior of the sign problem and investigate the possible emergence of stripe spin-density wave order in the system with repulsive interaction.
"We have studied the extended Hubbard and the Peierls-extended Hubbard models in one dimension using primarily computational methods. We discuss the derivation of the models and the computational methods used to study them, focusing primarily on our extensions over existing numerical methods. In particular, we present the construction of ""operator-loop"" updates for spin-1/2 fermions and the inclusion of electron-phonon interactions in the Stochastic Series Expansion Quantum Monte Carlo method and the use of Quantum Parallel Tempering to improve the quality of the numerical data. For the extended Hubbard model at half-filling, we have confirmed the existence of a recently reported bond-order wave phase for the ground state in a small region of parameter space between the well-known charge- and spin-density wave phases. We have studied in detail the nature of the associated quantum phase transitions between all the phases. Upon doping away from half-filling, the doubly-degenerate, spin and charge gapped long-range-ordered ground states of the model are shown to evolve to a Luther-Emery liquid with no charge gap but a finite spin gap. For the Peierls-extended Hubbard model, which includes both electron-phonon and electron-electron interactions, we have studied the dimerization transition of the half-filled system in the presence of fully quantum mechanical phonons. We show that the transition to a dimerized state occurs only when the electron-phonon coupling exceeds a finite critical value that depends on the bare phonon frequency. This is in contrast to previous studies in similar models with adiabatic phonons that had predicted a dimerized state for arbitrarily small values of the electron-phonon coupling."