We demonstrate that laser excitations can coherently induce a novel Kondo effect in ultracold atoms in optical lattices. Using a model of alkaline-earth fermions with two orbitals, it is shown that the optically coupled two internal states are dynamically entangled to form the Kondo-singlet state, overcoming the heating effect due to the irradiation. Furthermore, a lack of SU(N) symmetry in the optical coupling provides a peculiar feature in the Kondo effect, which results in spin-selective renormalization of effective masses. We also discuss the effects of interorbital exchange interactions, and reveal that they induce novel crossover or reentrant behavior of the Kondo effect owing to control of the coupling anisotropy. The laser-induced Kondo effect is highly controllable by tuning the laser strength and the frequency, and thus offers a versatile platform to study the Kondo physics using ultracold atoms.
We propose a scheme to investigate the interplay between the Kondo-exchange interaction and the quantum spin Hall effect with ultracold fermionic alkaline-earth-metal atoms trapped in two-dimensional optical lattices using ultracold collision and laser-assisted tunneling. In the strong Kondo-coupling regime, although the loop trajectory of the mobile atom disappears, collective dynamics of an atom pair in two clock states can exhibit an unexpected spin-dependent cyclotron orbit in a plaquette, realizing the quantum spin Hall effect of the Kondo singlet. We demonstrate that the collective cyclotron dynamics of the spin-zero Kondo singlet is governed by an effective Harper-Hofstadter model in addition to second-order diagonal tunneling.
We propose a scheme to realize the Kondo model with tunable anisotropy using alkaline-earth atoms in an optical lattice. The new feature of our setup is Floquet engineering of interactions using time-dependent Zeeman shifts, that can be realized either using state-dependent optical Stark shifts or magnetic fields. The properties of the resulting Kondo model strongly depend on the anisotropy of the ferromagnetic interactions. In particular, easy-plane couplings give rise to Kondo singlet formation even though microscopic interactions are all ferromagnetic. We discuss both equilibrium and dynamical properties of the system that can be measured with ultracold atoms, including the impurity spin susceptibility, the impurity spin relaxation rate, as well as the equilibrium and dynamical spin correlations between the impurity and the ferromagnetic bath atoms. We analyze the nonequilibrium time evolution of the system using a variational non-Gaussian approach, which allows us to explore coherent dynamics over both short and long timescales, as set by the bandwidth and the Kondo singlet formation, respectively. In the quench-type experiments, when the Kondo interaction is suddenly switched on, we find that real-time dynamics shows crossovers reminiscent of poor man's renormalization group flow used to describe equilibrium systems. For bare easy-plane ferromagnetic couplings, this allows us to follow the formation of the Kondo screening cloud as the dynamics crosses over from ferromagnetic to antiferromagnetic behavior. On the other side of the phase diagram, our scheme makes it possible to measure quantum corrections to the well-known Korringa law describing the temperature dependence of the impurity spin relaxation rate. Theoretical results discussed in our paper can be measured using currently available experimental techniques.
Ultracold gases of fermionic alkaline-earth(-like) atoms are hopeful candidates for the quantum simulation of many-body physics induced by magnetic impurities (e.g., the Kondo physics), because there are spin-exchange interactions (SEIs) between two atoms in the electronic ground (
1S0) and metastable (
3P) state, respectively. Nevertheless, this SEI cannot be tuned via magnetic Feshbach resonance. In this paper, we propose three methods to control the SEI between one atom in the
1S0 state and another atom in the
3P2 states or $^{3}\mathrm{P}_{2}\text{\ensuremath{-}}^{3}\mathrm{P}_{0}$ dressed states, with one or two laser beams. These methods are based on the spin-dependent ac-Stark shifts of the
3P2 states or the $^{3}\mathrm{P}_{2}\text{\ensuremath{-}}^{3}\mathrm{P}_{0}$ Raman coupling. We show that due to the structure of alkaline-earth (like) atoms, the heating effects induced by the laser beams of our methods are very weak. For instance, for ultracold Yb atoms, ac-Stark-shift difference of variant spin states of the
3P2(F=3/2) level, or the strength of the $^{3}\mathrm{P}_{2}\text{\ensuremath{-}}^{3}\mathrm{P}_{0}$ Raman coupling, could be of the order of $(2\ensuremath{\pi})\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}\mathrm{MHz}$, while the heating rate (photon scattering rate) is only of the order of Hz. As a result, the Feshbach resonances, with which one can efficiently control the SEI by changing the laser intensity, may be induced by the laser beams with a low-enough heating rate, even if the scattering lengths of the bare interatomic interaction are so small that they are comparable with the length scale associated with the van der Waals interaction.
We propose that ultracold alkaline-earth-like atoms confined in one-dimensional optical lattice can realize a Kondo lattice model which hosts a symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phase and an associated quantum phase transition in a controllable manner. The symmetry protection of the phase transition is discussed from two different viewpoints: topological properties related to spatial patterns of Kondo singlets and symmetry eigenvalues of the spin states. We uncover the role of various symmetries in the phase diagram of this system by combining a weak-coupling approach by Abelian bosonization and strong-coupling pictures of ground states. Furthermore, we show that the bosonization approach correctly describes a crossover from a fermionic SPT phase to a bosonic SPT phase and an associated change of protecting symmetries as the charge degrees of freedom are frozen by the Hubbard repulsion.
The Kondo effect describes the spin-exchange interaction between localized impurities and itinerant fermions. The ultracold alkaline-earth atomic gas provides a natural platform for quantum simulation of the Kondo model, utilizing its long-lived clock state and the nuclear-spin exchange interaction between clock state and ground state. One of the key issue now is whether the Kondo temperature can be high enough to be reached in current experiments, for which we have proposed to use transverse confinement to confine atoms into a one-dimensional tube and to use the confinement-induced resonance to enhance Kondo coupling. In this work, we further consider the
(1+0)-dimensional scattering problem when the clock state is further confined by an axial harmonic confinement. We show that this axial confinement for the clock-state atoms not only plays a role for localizing them, but can also act as an additional control knob to reach the confinement-induced resonance. We show that, in the presence of both the transverse and the axial confinements, the confinement-induced resonance can be reached in the practical conditions and the Kondo effect can be attainable in this system.