We study a spinor (two-component) Bose gas confined in a one-dimensional double-valley optical lattice which has a double-well structure in momentum space. Based on field theory analysis, it is found that spinor bosons in the double-valley band may form a spin-charge mixed chiral spin quasicondensate under certain conditions. Our numerical calculations in a concrete $\ensuremath{\pi}$-flux triangular ladder system confirm the robustness of the chiral spin order against interactions and quantum fluctuations. This exotic atomic Bose-Einstein condensate exhibits spatially staggered spin loop currents without any charge dynamics despite the complete absence of spin-orbit coupling in the system, creating an interesting approach to atom spintronics. The entanglement entropy scaling allows us to extract conformal-field-theory central charge and establish the low-energy effective field theory for the chiral spin condensate as a two-component Luttinger liquid. Our predictions should be detectable in atomic experiments through spin-resolved time-of-flight techniques.
We study a spinor (two-component) Bose gas confined in a one-dimensional double-valley optical lattice which has a double-well structure in momentum space. Based on field theory analysis, it is found that spinor bosons in the double-valley band may form a spin-charge mixed chiral spin quasicondensate under certain conditions. Our numerical calculations in a concrete \ensuremathπ-flux triangular ladder system confirm the robustness of the chiral spin order against interactions and quantum fluctuations. This exotic atomic Bose-Einstein condensate exhibits spatially staggered spin loop currents without any charge dynamics despite the complete absence of spin-orbit coupling in the system, creating an interesting approach to atom spintronics. The entanglement entropy scaling allows us to extract conformal-field-theory central charge and establish the low-energy effective field theory for the chiral spin condensate as a two-component Luttinger liquid. Our predictions should be detectable in atomic experiments through spin-resolved time-of-flight techniques.
Abstract Recent experiments on ultracold atoms in optical lattices have synthesized a variety of tunable bands with degenerate double-well structures in momentum space. Such degeneracies in the single-particle spectrum strongly enhance quantum fluctuations, and often lead to exotic many-body ground states. Here we consider weakly interacting spinor Bose gases in such bands, and discover a universal quantum ‘order by disorder’ phenomenon which selects a novel superfluid with chiral spin order displaying remarkable properties such as spontaneous spin Hall effect and momentum space antiferromagnetism. For bosons in the excited Dirac band of a hexagonal lattice, such a state supports staggered spin loop currents in real space. We show that Bloch oscillations provide a powerful dynamical route to quantum state preparation of such a chiral spin superfluid. Our predictions can be readily tested in spin-resolved time-of-flight experiments.
The recent experimental condensation of ultracold atoms in a triangular optical lattice with a negative effective tunneling parameter paves the way for the study of frustrated systems in a controlled environment. Here, we explore the critical behavior of the chiral phase transition in such a frustrated lattice in three dimensions. We represent the low-energy action of the lattice system as a two-component Bose gas corresponding to the two minima of the dispersion. The contact repulsion between the bosons separates into intra- and intercomponent interactions, referred to as V0 and V12, respectively. We first employ a Huang-Yang-Luttinger approximation of the free energy. For V12/V0=2, which corresponds to the bare interaction, this approach suggests a first-order phase transition, at which both the U(1) symmetry of condensation and the Z2 symmetry of the emergent chiral order are broken simultaneously. Furthermore, we perform a renormalization-group calculation at one-loop order. We demonstrate that the coupling regime $0<{V}_{12}/{V}_{0}\ensuremath{\le}1$ shares the critical behavior of the Heisenberg fixed point at V12/V0=1. For V12/V0>1 we show that V0 flows to a negative value, while V12 increases and remains positive. This results in a breakdown of the effective quartic-field theory due to a cubic anisotropy and, again, suggests a discontinuous phase transition.
Understanding strongly correlated quantum materials, such as high-T_{c} superconductors, iron-based superconductors, and twisted bilayer graphene systems, remains as one of the outstanding challenges in condensed matter physics. Quantum simulation with ultracold atoms in particular optical lattices, which provide orbital degrees of freedom, is a powerful tool to contribute new insights to this endeavor. Here, we report the experimental realization of an unconventional Bose-Einstein condensate of ^{87}Rb atoms populating degenerate p orbitals in a triangular optical lattice, exhibiting remarkably long coherence times. Using time-of-flight spectroscopy, we observe that this state spontaneously breaks the rotational symmetry and its momentum spectrum agrees with the theoretically predicted coexistence of exotic stripe and loop-current orders. Like certain strongly correlated electronic systems with intertwined orders, such as high-T_{c} cuprate superconductors, twisted bilayer graphene, and the recently discovered chiral density-wave state in kagome superconductors AV_{3}Sb_{5} (A=K, Rb, Cs), the newly demonstrated quantum state, in spite of its markedly different energy scale and the bosonic quantum statistics, exhibits multiple symmetry breakings at ultralow temperatures. These findings hold the potential to enhance our comprehension of the fundamental physics governing these intricate quantum materials.
Motivated by experiments on Josephson junction arrays in a magnetic field and ultracold interacting atoms in an optical lattice in the presence of a ``synthetic'' orbital magnetic field, we study the ``fully frustrated'' Bose-Hubbard model and quantum XY model with half a flux quantum per lattice plaquette. Using Monte Carlo simulations and the density matrix renormalization group method, we show that these kinetically frustrated boson models admit three phases at integer filling: a weakly interacting chiral superfluid phase with staggered loop currents which spontaneously break time-reversal symmetry, a conventional Mott insulator at strong coupling, and a remarkable ``chiral Mott insulator'' (CMI) with staggered loop currents sandwiched between them at intermediate correlation. We discuss how the CMI state may be viewed as an exciton condensate or a vortex supersolid, study a Jastrow variational wave function which captures its correlations, present results for the boson momentum distribution across the phase diagram, and consider various experimental implications of our phase diagram. Finally, we consider generalizations to a staggered flux Bose-Hubbard model and a two-dimensional (2D) version of the CMI in weakly coupled ladders.
Ultracold atoms have emerged as an indispensable setting to study quantum many-body systems. Recent experimental and theoretical work has explored the curious phases and novel properties of Bose-Einstein Condensate with optical lattices, and Bose-Einstein Condensate with light-induced artificial spin-orbit coupling. In this thesis, we report our research on these two types of boson systems. In the first topic, in contrast with calculations of bosons in optical lattices that focus on the tight-binding regime, we note that the single-particle states of bosons in a periodic potential generally satisfy the Mathieu equation, and have developed a formalism for studying bosons in an optical lattice using the Mathieu equation. Moreover, based on this formalism, we have proposed a self-consistent scheme for describing interacting bosons in an optical lattice using Hartree Fock approximation. We apply this scheme to quantify the effects of inter-atomic interactions on the properties of bosons in an optical lattice, as exhibited in the comparison between observables of non-interacting and interacting systems, such as the superfluid transition temperature and momentum distribution as probed in time-of-flight expansion. In the second topic, the phases of a Bose-Einstein condensate with light-induced spin-orbit coupling are studied within the mean-field approximation. We obtain the phase diagram at fixed chemical potential and at fixed density for bosons with spin-orbit coupling, finding a regime of phase separation and a regime in which the bosons condensed into a mixed phase. We determine how this phase diagram evolves as a function of the atom interaction parameters and as a function of the strength of light-atom coupling. The mixed phase is found to be stable for sufficiently small light-atom coupling. Specifically, we show that the structure of the phase diagram at fixed chemical potential suggests an unusual density dependence for the mixed phase in a harmonic trapping potential, in which the density of one spin increases with increasing radius, suggesting a unique experimental signature of this state. The collective Bogoliubov sound mode is shown to also provide a signature of the mixed phase, vanishing as the boundary to the regime of phase separation is approached. Together, in these two topics we address the need to enhance the understanding of the unconventional physical properties of Bose-Einstein Condensate in a controlled electromagnetic environment (optical lattices, Raman lasers, etc.), and provide predictions for possible experimental findings.
In this paper, we study a strongly correlated quantum system that has become amenable to experiment by the advent of ultracold bosonic atoms in optical lattices, a chain of two different bosonic constituents. Excitations in this system are first considered within the framework of bosonization and the Luttinger liquid theory which are applicable if the Luttinger liquid parameters are determined numerically. The occurrence of a bosonic counterpart of fermionic spin–charge separation is signalled by a characteristic two-peak structure in the spectral functions found by dynamical density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) in good agreement with analytical predictions. Experimentally, single-particle excitations as probed by spectral functions are currently not accessible in cold atoms. Therefore we consider the modifications needed for current experiments, namely the investigation of the real-time evolution of density perturbations instead of single-particle excitations, a slight inequivalence between the two intraspecies interactions in actual experiments, and the presence of a confining trap potential. Using time-dependent DMRG, we show that only quantitative modifications occur. With an eye to the simulation of strongly correlated quantum systems far from equilibrium, we detect a strong dependence of the time-evolution of entanglement entropy on the initial perturbation.