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arXiv:1508.02308 · Nano Letters

Double-Well Ultracold-Fermions Computational Microscopy: Wave-Function Anatomy of Attractive-Pairing and Wigner-Molecule Entanglement and Natural Orbitals

Benedikt B. Brandt, Constantine Yannouleas, Uzi Landman

Published Sep 9, 2015• 28 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

"Bottom-up" approaches to the many-body physics of fermions have recently demonstrated precise number and site-resolved preparations with tunability of interparticle interactions in single-well, SW, and double-well, DW, nanoscale confinements created by manipulating ultracold fermionic atoms with optical tweezers. These experiments emulate an analogue-simulator mapping onto the requisite microscopic Hamiltonian, approaching realization of Feynmans' vision of quantum simulators that "will do exactly the same as nature". Here we report on exact benchmark configuration-interaction computational microscopy solutions of the Hamiltonian, uncovering the spectral evolution, wave function anatomy, and entanglement properties of the interacting fermions in the entire parameter range, including crossover from an SW to a DW confinement and a controllable energy imbalance between the wells. We demonstrate attractive pairing and formation of repulsive, highly correlated, ultracold Wigner molecules, well-described in the natural orbital representation. The agreement with the measurements affirms the henceforth gained deep insights into ultracold molecules and opens access to the size-dependent evolution of nanoclustered and condensed-matter phases and ultracold-atoms quantum information.

DOI
10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b03199

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Identification and understanding of the evolution of interference patterns in two-particle momentum correlations as a function of the strength of interatomic interactions are important in explorations of the nature of quantum states of trapped particles. Together with the analysis of two-particle spatial correlations, they offer the prospect of uncovering fundamental symmetries and structure of correlated many-body states, as well as opening vistas into potential control and utilization of correlated quantum states as quantum-information resources. With the use of the second-order density matrix constructed via exact diagonalization of the microscopic Hamiltonian, and an analytic Hubbard-type model, we explore here the systematic evolution of characteristic interference patterns in the two-body momentum and spatial correlation maps of two entangled ultracold fermionic atoms in a double well, for the entire attractive- and repulsive-interaction range. We uncover quantum-statistics-governed bunching and antibunching, as well as interaction-dependent interference patterns, in the ground and excited states, and interpret our results in light of the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference physics, widely exploited in photon indistinguishability testing and quantum-information science.
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We have prepared two ultracold fermionic atoms in an isolated double-well potential and obtained full control over the quantum state of this system. In particular, we can independently control the interaction strength between the particles, their tunneling rate between the wells and the tilt of the potential. By introducing repulsive (attractive) interparticle interactions we have realized the two-particle analog of a Mott-insulating (charge-density-wave) state. We have also spectroscopically observed how second-order tunneling affects the energy of the system. This work realizes the first step of a bottom-up approach to deterministically create a single-site addressable realization of a ground-state Fermi-Hubbard system.