I study cross dimensionality of $p$-orbital atomic fermions loaded in an optical square lattice with repulsive interactions. The cross-dimensionality emerges when the transverse tunneling of $p$-orbital fermions is negligible. With renormalization group analysis, the system is found to support two dimensional charge, orbital, and spin density wave states with incommensurate wavevectors. The transition temperatures of these states are controlled by perturbations near a one dimensional Luttinger liquid fixed point. Considering transverse tunneling, the cross-dimensionality breaks down and the density wave (DW) orders become unstable, and I find an unconventional superconducting state mediated by fluctuation effects. The superconducting gap has an emergent nodal structure determined by the Fermi momentum, which is tunable by controlling atomic density. Taking an effective description of the superconducting state, it is shown that the nodal structure of Cooper pairing can be extracted from momentum-space radio-frequency spectroscopy in atomic experiments. These results imply that $p$-orbital fermions could enrich the possibilities of studying correlated physics in optical lattice quantum emulators beyond the single-band Fermi Hubbard model.
Cross Dimensionality and Emergent Nodal Superconductivity with p-orbital Atomic Fermions
I study cross dimensionality of p-orbital atomic fermions loaded in an optical square lattice with repulsive interactions. The cross-dimensionality emerges when the transverse tunneling of p-orbital fermions is negligible. With renormalization group analysis, the system is found to support two dimensional charge, orbital, and spin density wave states with incommensurate wavevectors. The transition temperatures of these states are controlled by perturbations near a one dimensional Luttinger liquid fixed point. Considering transverse tunneling, the cross-dimensionality breaks down and the density wave (DW) orders become unstable, and I find an unconventional superconducting state mediated by fluctuation effects. The superconducting gap has an emergent nodal structure determined by the Fermi momentum, which is tunable by controlling atomic density. Taking an effective description of the superconducting state, it is shown that the nodal structure of Cooper pairing can be extracted from momentum-space radio-frequency spectroscopy in atomic experiments. These results imply that p-orbital fermions could enrich the possibilities of studying correlated physics in optical lattice quantum emulators beyond the single-band Fermi Hubbard model.
Motivated by exploring superconductivity in multi-orbital systems, we study two orbital models of spinful fermions representing (px,py) or (dxz,dyz) orbitals on the square lattice. For minimal interorbital t-J or t-V on-site interactions, a random phase approximation uncovers regimes of instability towards incommensurate dxy pair density wave (d-PDW) superconductivity with driven by interband pairing. We study the competition of PDW order with uniform nodal dxy pairing states and magnetic and charge density wave (CDW) instabilities. At strong coupling, we derive an effective hard-core Cooper pair Hamiltonian which we study using a bosonic Gutzwiller ansatz to reveal a period-2 PDW over a wide range of fillings as well as a checkerboard CDW at quarter-filling. Our results apply to correlated multi-orbital materials with quasi-1D bands, Hubbard models on the square-octagon lattice, and atomic fermions in p-orbitals. Our work highlights the role of the orbital content and multiband Fermi surfaces in stabilizing interband PDW states.
We study the superconducting order in a two-dimensional square lattice Hubbard model with weak repulsive interactions, subject to a Zeeman field and weak Rashba spin-orbit interactions. Diagonalizing the noninteracting Hamiltonian leads to two separate bands, and by deriving an effective low-energy interaction we find the mean field gap equations for the superconducting order parameter on the bands. Solving the gap equations just below the critical temperature, we find that superconductivity is caused by Kohn-Luttinger-type interaction, while the pairing symmetry of the bands is indirectly affected by the spin-orbit coupling. The dominating attractive momentum channel of the Kohn-Luttinger term depends on the filling fraction n of the system, and it is therefore possible to change the momentum dependence of the order parameter by tuning n. Moreover, n also determines which band has the highest critical temperature. Rotating the magnetic field changes the momentum dependence from states that for small momenta reduce to a chiral ${p}_{x}\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}i{p}_{y}$ type state for out-of-plane fields, to a nodal p-wave-type state for purely in-plane fields.
We provide a quasi-one-dimensional model which can support a pair-density-wave (PDW) state, in which the superconducting (SC) order parameter modulates periodically in space, with gapless Bogoliubov quasiparticle excitations. The model consists of an array of strongly interacting one-dimensional systems, where the one-dimensional systems are coupled to each other by local interactions and tunneling of the electrons and Cooper pairs between them. Within the interchain mean-field theory, we find several SC states from the model, including a conventional uniform SC state, PDW SC state, and a coexisting phase of the uniform SC and PDW states. In this quasi-1D regime we can treat the strong correlation physics essentially exactly using bosonization methods and the crossover to the 2D system by means of interchain mean-field theory. The resulting critical temperatures of the SC phases generically exhibit a power-law scaling with the coupling constants of the array, instead of the essential singularity found in weak-coupling BCS-type theories. Electronic excitations with an open Fermi surface, which emerge from the electronic Luttinger liquid systems below their crossover temperature to the Fermi liquid, are then coupled to the SC order parameters via the proximity effect. From the Fermi surface thus coupled to the SC order parameters, we calculate the quasiparticle spectrum in detail. We show that the quasiparticle spectrum can be fully gapped or nodal in the uniform SC phase and also in the coexisting phase of the uniform SC and PDW parameters. In the pure PDW state, the excitation spectrum has a reconstructed Fermi surface in the form of Fermi pockets of Bogoliubov quasiparticles.
One of the most interesting and challenging problems in physics is understanding strongly correlated many-body systems, where strong interactions can yield many remarkable phenomena such as superfluidity in 4He, high-temperature superconductivity, etc. In order to attack these problems, we often need to reduce the complexity of the systems to simple models in hopes of getting better insights into the properties of the systems. The Hubbard model, the focus of this dissertation, is one of the most famous examples of such model, which describes a tunneling of electrons between nearest neighbor sites of a lattice with on-site interactions. This simple model is an important concept in condensed matter physics and provides rich understandings of electronic and magnetic properties of materials. Despite its simplicity, there is no general analytical solution to the Hubbard model beyond 1D.;The discovery of ultracold atoms and optical lattices opens up the possibility of emulating the Hubbard model in experiments. Optical lattices provide an ideal realization of the Hubbard model where relevant parameters can be tuned systematically. It makes theoretical studies of the Hubbard model increasingly attractive since a direct comparison between theoretical calculations and experimental results becomes more and more possible.;In this dissertation, the ground-state properties of the repulsive Hubbard model for weak to intermediate interaction strengths in two, three dimensions and their dimensional crossover are studied within the mean field theory. We show that the system exhibits unidirectional spin-density wave (SDW) order with antiferromagnetic correlations and a long wavelength modulation. The modulating wave is along the [0011-direction at low interaction strength U/t and along the [1111-direction at higher U/t. The evolution of the wavelength of the SDW is determined as a function of U/t, the density, and t⊥/t. With an analysis of the pairing of spins based on nesting and deformation of the Fermi surface, we discuss how these results can be rationalized and how a simple, predictive model can be constructed for the properties of the SDW states.
We study the phase diagram of the extended Hubbard model on a two-dimensional square lattice, including on-site (U) and nearest-neighbor (V) interactions, at weak couplings. We show that the charge-density wave phase that is known to occur at half filling when 4V>U gives way to a dxy-wave superconducting instability away from half filling, when the Fermi surface is not perfectly nested, and for sufficiently large repulsive V and a range of on-site repulsive interaction U. In addition, when nesting is further suppressed and in the presence of a nearest-neighbor attraction, a triplet time-reversal breaking (px+ipy)-wave pairing instability emerges, competing with the ${d}_{{x}^{2}\ensuremath{-}{y}^{2}}$ pairing state that is known to dominate at fillings just slightly away from half. At even smaller fillings, where the Fermi surface no longer presents any nesting, the (px+ipy)-wave superconducting phase dominates in the whole regime of on-site repulsions and nearest-neighbor attractions, while dxy pairing occurs in the presence of on-site attraction. Our results suggest that zero-energy Majorana fermions can be realized on a square lattice in the presence of a magnetic field. For a system of cold fermionic atoms on a two-dimensional square optical lattice, both an on-site repulsion and a nearest-neighbor attraction would be required, in addition to rotation of the system to create vortices. We discuss possible ways of experimentally engineering the required interaction terms in a cold atom system.
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.