Bosons have a natural instinct to condense at zero temperature. It is a long-standing challenge to create a high-dimensional quantum liquid that does not exhibit long-range order at the ground state, as either extreme experimental parameters or sophisticated designs of microscopic Hamiltonians are required for suppressing the condensation. Here we show that synthetic gauge fields for ultracold atoms, using either the Raman scheme or shaken lattices, provide physicists a simple and practical scheme to produce a two-dimensional algebraic quantum liquid at the ground state. This quantum liquid arises at a critical Lifshitz point, where a two-dimensional quartic dispersion emerges in the momentum space, and many fundamental properties of two-dimensional bosons are changed in its proximity. Such an ideal simulator of the quantum Lifshitz model allows experimentalists to directly visualize and explore the deconfinement transition of topological excitations, an intriguing phenomenon that is difficult to access in other systems.
Bosons have a natural instinct to condense at zero temperature. It is a long-standing challenge to create a high-dimensional quantum liquid that does not exhibit long-range order at the ground state, as either extreme experimental parameters or sophisticated designs of microscopic Hamiltonians are required for suppressing the condensation. Here we show that synthetic gauge fields for ultracold atoms, using either the Raman scheme or shaken lattices, provide physicists a simple and practical scheme to produce a two-dimensional algebraic quantum liquid at the ground state. This quantum liquid arises at a critical Lifshitz point, where a two-dimensional quartic dispersion emerges in the momentum space, and many fundamental properties of two-dimensional bosons are changed in its proximity. Such an ideal simulator of the quantum Lifshitz model allows experimentalists to directly visualize and explore the deconfinement transition of topological excitations, an intriguing phenomenon that is difficult to access in other systems.
Abstract The past few years have seen fascinating progress in the creation and utilization of synthetic gauge fields for charge-neutral ultracold atoms. Whereas the synthesis of gauge fields in itself is readily interesting, it is more exciting to explore the new era that will be brought by the interplay between synthetic gauge fields and many other degrees of freedom of highly tunable ultracold atoms. This topical review surveys recent developments in using synthetic gauge fields to manipulate novel quantum phenomena that are not easy to access in other systems. We first summarize current experimental methods of creating synthetic gauge fields, including the use of Raman schemes, shaken lattices, and Raman-dressed lattices. We then discuss how synthetic gauge fields bring new physics to non-interacting systems, including degenerate single-particle ground states, quartic dispersions, topological band structures in lattices, and synthetic dimensions. As for interacting systems, we focus on novel quantum many-body states and quantum macroscopic phenomena induced by interactions in the presence of unconventional single-particle dispersions. For bosons, we discuss how a quartic dispersion leads to non-condensed bosonic states at low temperatures and at the ground state. For fermions, we discuss chiral superfluids in the presence of attractive s-wave interaction, where high partial-wave interactions are not required. Finally, we discuss the challenges in current experiments, and conclude with an outlook for what new exciting developments synthetic gauge fields may bring us in the near future.
Deconfined quantum critical points are characterized by the presence of an emergent gauge field and exotic fractionalized particles, which exist as well-defined excitations only at the critical point. We here demonstrate the existence of quantum critical points described by an emergent tensor gauge theory featuring subdimensional excitations, in close relation to fracton theories. We begin by reexamining a previously studied Lifshitz transition between two valence bond solid (VBS) phases on a bilayer honeycomb lattice. We show that the critical theory maps onto a rank-2 tensor gauge theory featuring one-dimensional particles. In a slightly different context, the same tensor gauge theory also describes a Lifshitz quantum critical point between a two-dimensional superfluid and a finite-momentum Bose condensate, both of which are dual to rank-1 gauge theories. This represents an entirely new class of deconfined quantum criticality, in which a critical tensor gauge theory arises on top of a stable conventional gauge theory. Furthermore, we propose that this quantum critical point gives rise to a new finite-temperature phase of bosons, behaving as an exciton Bose condensate, in which excitons (boson-hole pairs) are condensed but individual bosons are not. We discuss how small modifications of this theory give rise to the stable quantum ``exciton Bose liquid'' phase studied in Paramekanti, Balents, and Fisher, Phys. Rev. B 66, 054526 (2002).
In the presence of strong spin-independent interactions and spin-orbit coupling, we show that the spinor Bose liquid confined to one spatial dimension undergoes an interaction- or density-tuned quantum phase transition similar to one theoretically proposed for itinerant magnetic solid-state systems. The order parameter describes broken Z2 inversion symmetry, with the ordered phase accompanied by non-vanishing momentum which is generated by fluctuations of an emergent dynamical gauge field at the phase transition. This quantum phase transition has dynamical critical exponent z≃2, typical of a Lifshitz transition, but is described by a nontrivial interacting fixed point. From direct numerical simulation of the microscopic model, we extract previously unknown critical exponents for this fixed point. Our model describes a realistic situation of 1D ultracold atoms with Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling, establishing this system as a platform for studying exotic critical behavior of the Hertz-Millis type.
A quantum ground state of matter is realized in a bosonic model on a three-dimensional fcc lattice with emergent low energy excitations. The phase obtained is a stable gapless boson liquid phase, with algebraic boson density correlations. The stability of this phase is protected against the instanton effect and superfluidity by self-duality and large gauge symmetries on both sides of the duality. The gapless collective excitations of this phase closely resemble the graviton, although they have a soft $\ensuremath{\omega}\ensuremath{\sim}{k}^{2}$ dispersion relation. There are three branches of gapless excitations in this phase, one of which is gapless scalar trace mode, the other two have the same polarization and gauge symmetries as the gravitons. The dynamics of this phase is described by a set of Maxwell's equations. The defects carrying gauge charges can drive the system into the superfluid order when the defects are condensed; also the topological defects are coupled to the dual gauge field in the same manner as the charge defects couple to the original gauge field, after the condensation of the topological defects, the system is driven into the Mott insulator phase. In the two-dimensional case, the gapless soft graviton as well as the algebraic liquid phase are destroyed by the vertex operators in the dual theory, and the stripe order is most likely to take place close to the two-dimensional quantum critical point at which the vertex operators are tuned to zero.
We show that the synthetic spin-orbit coupling created in current ultracold atom experiments provides physicists a unique tool to control the Luttinger liquid parameter K of weakly interacting bosons in one dimension. At a critical value of the Raman coupling strength ${\ensuremath{\Omega}}_{c}$, K is suppressed down to zero, and the characteristic quasi-long-range order for ordinary one-dimensional quantum systems disappears. Consequently, the single-particle correlation function decays exponentially at the ground state, signifying the rise of a one-dimensional quantum many-body state beyond the standard Luttinger liquid paradigm. Momentum distribution, as well as scaling relations for various quantities in the vicinity of the critical point, can be used as a direct diagnosis of this non-Luttinger quantum liquid.
Abstract In the presence of strong spin-independent interactions and spin-orbit coupling, we show that the spinor Bose liquid confined to one spatial dimension undergoes an interaction- or density-tuned quantum phase transition similar to one theoretically proposed for itinerant magnetic solid-state systems. The order parameter describes broken Z2 inversion symmetry, with the ordered phase accompanied by non-vanishing momentum which is generated by fluctuations of an emergent dynamical gauge field at the phase transition. This quantum phase transition has dynamical critical exponent z ≃ 2, typical of a Lifshitz transition, but is described by a nontrivial interacting fixed point. From direct numerical simulation of the microscopic model, we extract previously unknown critical exponents for this fixed point. Our model describes a realistic situation of 1D ultracold atoms with Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling, establishing this system as a platform for studying exotic critical behavior of the Hertz-Millis type.