We theoretically investigate the behavior of a system of fermionic atoms loaded in a bipartite one-dimensional optical lattice that is under the action of an external time-periodic driving force. By using Floquet theory, an effective model is derived. The bare hopping coefficients are renormalized by zeroth-order Bessel functions of the first kind with different arguments for the nearest-neighbor and next-nearest-neighbor hopping. The insulating behavior characterizing the system at half filling in the absence of driving is dynamically suppressed, and for particular values of the driving parameter the system becomes either a standard metal or an unconventional metal with four Fermi points. The existence of the four-Fermi-point metal relies on the fact that, as a consequence of the shaking procedure, the next-nearest-neighbor hopping coefficients become significant compared to the nearest-neighbor ones. We use the bosonization technique to investigate the effect of on-site Hubbard interactions on the four-Fermi-point metal-insulator phase transition. Attractive interactions are expected to enlarge the regime of parameters where the unconventional metallic phase arises, whereas repulsive interactions reduce it. This metallic phase is known to be a Luther-Emery liquid (spin-gapped metal) for both repulsive and attractive interactions, contrary to the usual Hubbard model, which exhibits a Mott-insulator phase for repulsive interactions. Ultracold fermions in driven one-dimensional bipartite optical lattices provide an interesting platform for the realization of this long-studied four-Fermi-point unconventional metal.
We theoretically investigate the behavior of a system of fermionic atoms loaded in a bipartite one-dimensional optical lattice that is under the action of an external time-periodic driving force. By using Floquet theory, an effective model is derived. The bare hopping coefficients are renormalized by zeroth-order Bessel functions of the first kind with different arguments for the nearest-neighbor and next-nearest-neighbor hopping. The insulating behavior characterizing the system at half filling in the absence of driving is dynamically suppressed, and for particular values of the driving parameter the system becomes either a standard metal or an unconventional metal with four Fermi points. The existence of the four-Fermi-point metal relies on the fact that, as a consequence of the shaking procedure, the next-nearest-neighbor hopping coefficients become significant compared to the nearest-neighbor ones. We use the bosonization technique to investigate the effect of on-site Hubbard interactions on the four-Fermi-point metal-insulator phase transition. Attractive interactions are expected to enlarge the regime of parameters where the unconventional metallic phase arises, whereas repulsive interactions reduce it. This metallic phase is known to be a Luther-Emery liquid (spin-gapped metal) for both repulsive and attractive interactions, contrary to the usual Hubbard model, which exhibits a Mott-insulator phase for repulsive interactions. Ultracold fermions in driven one-dimensional bipartite optical lattices provide an interesting platform for the realization of this long-studied four-Fermi-point unconventional metal.
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.
We consider ultracold bosons in a two-dimensional square optical lattice described by the Bose-Hubbard model. In addition, an external time-dependent sinusoidal force is applied to the system, which shakes the lattice along one of the diagonals. The effect of the shaking is to renormalize the nearest-neighbor-hopping coefficients, which can be arbitrarily reduced, can vanish, or can even change sign, depending on the shaking parameter. Therefore, it is necessary to account for higher-order-hopping terms, which are renormalized differently by the shaking, and to introduce anisotropy into the problem. We show that the competition between these different hopping terms leads to finite-momentum condensates with a momentum that may be tuned via the strength of the shaking. We calculate the boundaries between the Mott insulator and the different superfluid phases and present the time-of-flight images expected to be observed experimentally. Our results open up possibilities for the realization of bosonic analogs of the Fulde, Ferrel, Larkin, and Ovchinnikov phase describing inhomogeneous superconductivity.
An unusual metallic phase is argued to develop in the one-dimensional ionic Hubbard model, at half-filling and zero magnetization, at intermediate electron-electron repulsion U when second-neighbors hopping is allowed and tuned close to a topological Lifshitz transition (connected with a change of the Fermi surface in the noninteracting system). The metallic state lies between a band insulator phase at low repulsion and a correlated (Mott-like) insulator phase at high repulsion. In approaching the latter, the model supports short-range antiferromagnetic order and spontaneous dimerization of both bond charge and nearest-neighbor antiferromagnetic correlations. A combination of mean-field and effective-field theory (bosonization) provides an analytical understanding of the physical processes underlying the argued phase transitions. The ground and low-energy excited states of finite-length chains are explored by density-matrix renormalization-group (DMRG) calculations, providing numerical evidence for the intermediate gapless phase. Such finite systems are attainable by cold atoms in optical lattices for a wide range of the parameter U.
Non-equilibrium control of electronic properties in condensed matter systems can result in novel phenomena. In this work, we provide a novel non-equilibrium route to realize half-metallic phases. We explore the periodically driven Hubbard model on a bipartite lattice and demonstrate that a specially designed sublattice dependent drive can transform a weakly interacting metal or insulator into a ferrimagnetic half-metal (HM). We consider a Fermi-Hubbard model with only nearest-neighbour hopping and Floquet engineer the elusive half-metal phase by driving the site potentials periodically. The drive induces staggered higher range hoppings and a staggered potential between two sublattices in the Floquet Hamiltonian. Close to the dynamical localization point, due to the suppression of nearest neighbor hopping in the driven system, an effective enhancement of various terms in the Floquet Hamiltonian, including the e-e interactions, occurs. This helps in stabilizing a broad ferrimagnetic HM phase for a wide range of drive parameters. This dynamically stabilized HM phase is a pristine platform for next-generation spintronics, topological quantum computing (specifically for engineering Majorana zero modes in hybrid nanowires) and ultrafast magnetic memory architectures.
We uncover a disorder-driven instability in the diffusive Fermi liquid phase of a class of many-fermion systems, indicative of a metal-insulator transition of first-order type, which arises solely from the competition between quenched disorder and interparticle interactions. Our result is expected to be relevant for sufficiently strong disorder in d=3 spatial dimensions. Specifically, we study a class of half-filled, Hubbard-like models for spinless fermions with (complex) random hopping and short-ranged interactions on bipartite lattices in $d\ensuremath{\geqslant}2$. In a given realization, the hopping disorder breaks time-reversal invariance but preserves the special ``nesting'' symmetry responsible for the charge density wave instability of the ballistic Fermi liquid. This disorder may arise, e.g., from the application of a random magnetic field to the otherwise clean model. We derive a low-energy effective field theory description for this class of disordered, interacting fermion systems, which takes the form of a Finkel'stein nonlinear sigma model $(\mathrm{FNL}\ensuremath{\sigma}\mathrm{M})$ (A. M. Finkel'stein, Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. 84, 168 (1983) [Sov. Phys. JETP 57, 97 (1983)]). We analyze the $\mathrm{FNL}\ensuremath{\sigma}\mathrm{M}$ using a perturbative, one-loop renormalization group analysis controlled via an ϵ expansion in d=2+ϵ dimensions. We find that in d=2 dimensions, the interactions destabilize the conducting phase known to exist in the disordered, noninteracting system. The metal-insulator transition that we identify in d>2 dimensions (ϵ>0) occurs for disorder strengths of order ϵ, and is therefore perturbatively accessible for ϵ⪡1. We emphasize that the disordered system has no localized phase in the absence of interactions, so that a localized phase and the transition into it can only appear due to the presence of the interactions.
An ultracold gas of interacting fermionic atoms in a three-dimensional optical lattice is considered, where the lattice potential strength is periodically modulated. This non-equilibrium system is non-perturbatively described by means of a Keldysh-Floquet-Green's function approach for Mott-Hubbard systems employing a generalized dynamical mean field theory (DMFT). Strong repulsive interactions between different atoms lead to a Mott insulator state for the equilibrium system, but the additional external driving at zero temperature yields a non-equilibrium quantum critical behavior, where an infinite number of Floquet states arise and a transition to the liquid and conducting phase is given.