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arXiv:1707.01463 · Physical Review Letters

Interaction Effects with Varying N in SU(N) Symmetric Fermion Lattice Systems

Shenglong Xu, Julio T. Barreiro, Yu Wang, Congjun Wu

Published Oct 19, 2018• 26 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The interaction effects in ultracold Fermi gases with SU(N) symmetry are studied nonperturbatively in half filled one-dimensional lattices by employing quantum Monte Carlo simulations. We find that, as N increases, weak and strong interacting systems are driven to a crossover region, but from opposite directions as a convergence of itinerancy and Mottness. In the weak interaction region, particles are nearly itinerant, and interparticle collisions are enhanced by N, resulting in the amplification of interaction effects. In contrast, in the strong coupling region, increasing N softens the Mott-insulating background through the enhanced virtual hopping processes. The crossover region exhibits nearly N-independent physical quantities, including the relative bandwidth, Fermi distribution, and the spin structure factor. The difference between even-N and odd-N systems is most prominent at small N's with strong interactions, since the odd case allows local real hopping with an energy scale much larger than the virtual one. The above effects can be experimentally tested in ultracold atom experiments with alkaline-earth(-like) fermions such as ^{87}Sr (^{173}Yb).

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.121.167205

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The interaction effects in ultracold Fermi gases with SU(N) symmetry are studied nonperturbatively in half filled one-dimensional lattices by employing quantum Monte Carlo simulations. We find that, as N increases, weak and strong interacting systems are driven to a crossover region, but from opposite directions as a convergence of itinerancy and Mottness. In the weak interaction region, particles are nearly itinerant, and interparticle collisions are enhanced by N, resulting in the amplification of interaction effects. In contrast, in the strong coupling region, increasing N softens the Mott-insulating background through the enhanced virtual hopping processes. The crossover region exhibits nearly N-independent physical quantities, including the relative bandwidth, Fermi distribution, and the spin structure factor. The difference between even-N and odd-N systems is most prominent at small N's with strong interactions, since the odd case allows local real hopping with an energy scale much larger than the virtual one. The above effects can be experimentally tested in ultracold atom experiments with alkaline-earth(-like) fermions such as ^{87}Sr (^{173}Yb).
Ultracold fermionic alkaline earth atoms confined in optical lattices realize Hubbard models with internal SU(N) symmetries, where N can be as large as ten. Such systems are expected to harbor exotic magnetic physics at temperatures below the superexchange energy scale. Employing quantum Monte Carlo simulations to access the low-temperature regime of one-dimensional chains, we show that after adiabatically loading a weakly interacting gas into the strongly interacting regime of an optical lattice, the final temperature decreases with increasing N. Furthermore, we estimate the temperature scale required to probe correlations associated with low-temperature SU(N) magnetism. Our findings are encouraging for the exploration of exotic large-N magnetic states in ongoing experiments.
One of the central goals of condensed matter theory is to understand the behavior of electrons under various circumstances. This dissertation focuses on the some relatively unexplored effects brought by lattices, in a general setting.One ingredient that lattices introduce is the orbital degrees of freedom, resulting from the interaction between electrons and background ions. We have non-perturbatively studied a strongly coupled multi-orbital electron liquid, which has a fully polarized ground state. Both Hund’s coupling and electron itinerancy are essential to building up the global spin coherence. At finite temperature, the system exhibits both Curie-Weiss type spin susceptibility and finite compressibility, demonstrating the coexistence of spin coherence and charge incoherence. At low temperature, the single particle excitation extends over the entire Brillouin zone rather than the vicinity of the Fermi surface due to the spin fluctuation.Another dramatic effect of lattices on electrons is the formation of Mott insulators. We consider a special type of Mott insulators occurring at non-integer fillings, which has a finite single-particle gap but strong local charge fluctuation. As an example, we studied 1D Hubbard model with SU(N) symmetry at half-filling. The systems are insulators for all values of N, but the filling is half-integer when N is odd. We demonstrate that the systems with N even and N odd exhibit distinct energy scales of charge and spin gaps. In the case of odd N, the local charge fluctuation leads to spin gap much greater than the super exchange energy scale. The difference between the systems with opposite parity of N is gradually smeared out as N increases.The symmetry of lattices can also enforce band touchings and band crossing, leading to nodal-line and nodal-point semi-metals. We explore the symmetry constraints on electrons imposed by generalized lattices with space-time mixing periodicities. which include the Floquet lattice systems as a special case. Compared to space and magnetic groups, the symmetry group of such systems is augmented by “time-screw” rotations and “time-glide” reflections involving fractional time translations. A complete classification of the 13 space-time groups in 1+1D and 275 space-time groups in 2+1D are performed. Kramers-type degeneracy can arise from space-time symmetries without the half-integer spinor structure, which constrains the winding number patterns of spectral dispersions. In 2+1D, non-symmorphic space-time symmetries enforce spectral degeneracies, leading to protected Floquet semi-metal states.
Rapid advancements in the experimental capabilities with ultracold alkaline-earth-like atoms (AEAs) bring to a surprisingly near term the prospect of performing quantum simulations of spin models and lattice field theories exhibiting SU( N ) symmetry. Motivated in particular by recent experiments preparing high density samples of strongly interacting 87 Sr atoms in a three-dimensional optical lattice, we develop a low-energy effective theory of fermionic AEAs which exhibits emergent multi-body SU( N )-symmetric interactions, where N is the number of atomic nuclear spin levels. Our theory is limited to the experimental regime of (i) a deep lattice, with (ii) at most one atom occupying each nuclear spin state on any lattice site. The latter restriction is a consequence of initial ground-state preparation. We fully characterize the low-lying excitations in our effective theory, and compare predictions of many-body interaction energies with direct measurements of many-body excitation spectra in an optical lattice clock. Our work makes the first step in enabling a controlled, bottom-up experimental investigation of multi-body SU( N ) physics.
We have systematically studied the thermodynamic properties of a two-dimensional half-filled SU(2N)\mathrm{SU}(2N)SU(2N) Hubbard model on a square lattice by using the determinant quantum Monte Carlo method. The entropy-temperature relation, the isoentropy curve, and the probability distribution of the on-site occupation number are calculated in both SU(4) and SU(6) cases, which exhibit prominent features of the Pomeranchuk effect. We analyze these thermodynamic behaviors based on energy scales in the density and spin channels. In the density channel, the interaction strength that marks the crossover from the weak to strong interaction regimes increases with the number of fermion components. In the spin channel, increasing the number of fermion components enhances quantum spin fluctuations, which is shown in the simulations of uniform spin susceptibilities and antiferromagnetic structure factors.
Abstract Symmetries play a crucial role in understanding phases of matter and the transitions between them. Theoretical investigations of quantum models with SU( N ) symmetry have provided important insights into many-body phenomena. However, these models have generally remained a theoretical idealization, since it is very difficult to exactly realize the SU( N ) symmetry in conventional quantum materials for large N . Intriguingly however, in recent years, ultracold alkaline-earth-atom (AEA) quantum simulators have paved the path to realize SU( N )-symmetric many-body models, where N is tunable and can be as large as 10. This symmetry emerges due to the closed shell structure of AEAs, thereby leading to a perfect decoupling of the electronic degrees of freedom from the nuclear spin. In this work, we provide a systematic review of recent theoretical and experimental work on the many-body physics of these systems. We first discuss the thermodynamic properties and collective modes of trapped Fermi gases, highlighting the enhanced interaction effects that appear as N increases. We then discuss the properties of the SU( N ) Fermi–Hubbard model, focusing on some of the major experimental achievements in this area. We conclude with a compendium highlighting some of the significant theoretical progress on SU( N ) lattice models and a discussion of some exciting directions for future research.
The interplay between charge and spin degrees of freedom in strongly correlated fermionic systems, in particular of Dirac fermions, is a long-standing problem in condensed matter physics. We investigate the competing orders in the half-filled SU(2N)\mathrm{SU}(2N)SU(2N) Hubbard model on a honeycomb lattice, which can be accurately realized in optical lattices with ultracold large-spin alkaline-earth fermions. Employing large-scale projector determinant quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we have explored quantum phase transitions from the gapless Dirac semimetals to the gapped Mott insulating phases in the SU(4) and SU(6) cases. Both of these Mott insulating states are found to be columnar valence bond solid (cVBS) and to be absent of the antiferromagnetic N\'eel ordering and the loop current ordering. Inside the cVBS phases, the dimer ordering is enhanced by increasing fermion components and behaves nonmonotonically as the interaction strength increases. Although the transitions generally should be of first order due to a cubic invariance possessed by the cVBS order, the coupling to gapless Dirac fermions can soften the transitions to second order through a nonanalytic term in the free energy. Our simulations provide important guidance for the experimental explorations of novel states of matter with ultracold alkaline-earth fermions.